CORD: Contention resolution by delay lines

The implementation of optical packet-switched networks requires that the problems of resource contention, signaling and local and global synchronization be resolved. A possible optical solution to resource contention is based on the use of switching matrices suitably connected with optical delay lines. Signaling could be dealt with using subcarrier multiplexing of packet headers. Synchronization could take advantage of clock tone multiplexing techniques, of digital processing for ultra-fast clock recovery, and of new distributed techniques for global packet-slot alignment. To explore the practical feasibility and effectiveness of these key techniques, a consortium was formed among the University of Massachusetts, Stanford University, and GTE Laboratories. The Consortium, funded by ARFA, has three main goals: investigating networking issues involved in optical contention resolution (University of Massachusetts), constructing an experimental contention-resolution optical (CRO) device (GTE Laboratories), and building a packet-switched optical network prototype employing a CRO and novel signaling/synchronization techniques (Stanford University). This paper describes the details of the project and provides an overview of the main results obtained so far.