A high speed network interface card for optical burst switched networks

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is emerging as an optical networking technology combining best of the features of optical circuit-switching technology and optical packet-switching technology. This paper discusses architecture and hardware implementation of a Network Interface Card (NIC) for an OBS network. The NIC implements a specific low-latency signaling protocol Just-in-Time (JIT) for OBS networks. This NIC can handle data streams up to I Gbps. Average OBS JIT signaling message processing time with this NIC is on the order of I microsecond. This is the first JIT OBS NIC implementation known to the authors. Complementary efforts are on-going to develop other elements for the OBS network.