A Hybrid Architecture Using Both Optical Burst Switching and Routed Wavelength

The development of wavelength division multiplexing opens a new horizon in optical networks and promises to be one of the best solutions for the high demand of the bandwidth. However, with this technology, many problems arise, especially those related to the architecture to be used in optical networks to take advantage of the huge potential of this technique. Many approaches and architectures have been proposed in literatures to carry information in optical domain. Among them, optical burst switching and wavelength routed network seems to be the most successful. In this work we present a brief description of these two techniques, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each scheme, and we furthermore propose a new architecture that uses both methods in order to overcome the limitations imposed by each approach.