Abstract

TBONE (Testbed for All-Optical Networking) is a multiswitch all-optical networking testbed under development by MITRE, Optivision, and TASC.¹ TBONE utilizes two optical crossbar switches. A unique feature of TBONE is that no prior provisioning/scheduling of traffic is required. That is, TBONE is a burst-switched network where the optical switches are reconfigured at the burst arrival time. Therefore, a signaling protocol must be implemented on TBONE, which has the ability to rapidly reconfigure the crossbar switches. It was desirable to implement a signaling protocol, which was well-suited to an all-optical gigabit-speed network and which could provide good throughput and delay performance. However, in the design of many signaling protocols implemented today, important characteristics of all-optical very high-speed networks were not considered.² Therefore, an analysis of new signaling protocols for all-optical networks was performed to determine which signaling protocol to be implemented on TBONE. As a result of this analysis, two new signaling protocols were chosen for implementation on TBONE: Connect/Confirmation (CC) and Tell-and-Go.²

© 1996 Optical Society of America