Traffic-driven optical IP networking architecture

This paper proposes a traffic-driven optical IP networking architecture for service provider networks. Its design is derived from the optical GMPLS architecture, which provides high performance but is not scalable since both optical paths and IP routes need to be arranged in a mesh topology. To improve scalability, we first modified the configuration so that paths and routes can be arranged in a tree topology. However, this approach may degrade performance due to traffic concentration at each tree's root. To prevent such performance degradation, we further modified the architecture so that both cut-through optical paths and cut-through IP routes can be assigned reactively, according to traffic demand, and these can work together in cooperation. As a result, our architecture achieves both high performance and scalability, in that the whole network performance can be maintained without a massive increase in the number of optical paths and IP routes, even if the number of customer networks grows.