Multihop lightwave networks: a new approach to achieve terabit capabilities

A multihop approach for achieving concurrency in distributed lightwave networks with hundreds or thousands of Gb/s throughput, even while the users are limited to rates of 1 Gb/s or lower, is described. Multihop networks avoid two serious drawbacks of standard multichannel approaches: the requirement of wavelength-agile transmitters or receivers, and pretransmission coordination between users wishing to communicate. Although transmitting a packet from one user to another may require routing the packet through intermediate network interface units, the approach's connectivity is specifically designed to achieve efficient use of the channel bandwidth, allow modular growth of the network from small to large configurations, and provide a degree of network reliability.<<ETX>>