Digital subcarrier cross-connect switching
View Patent ↗The present invention uses digital subcarrier cross-connect switching to accomplish various network processes more efficiently. These processes include interconnecting network components, and performing optical and optoelectronic add/drop operations.
1. A system of interconnected network segments, the system comprising:
a first network segment incorporating a digital subcarrier multiplexing technology and having a first digital subcarrier cross-connect switch;
a second network segment incorporating the digital subcarrier multiplexing technology and having a second digital subcarrier cross-connect switch;
a digital subcarrier bridging component interposed between the first and second digital subcarrier cross-connect switches such that a plurality of subcarrier circuits extend substantially seamlessly across both the first and second network segments; and
wherein switching channels is performed in the frequency domain.
2. The system as set forth in claim 1 , wherein the digital subcarrier bridging component is a digital subcarrier border cross-connect.
3. The system as set forth in claim 1 , wherein the digital subcarrier bridging component is a digital subcarrier gateway.
4. The system as set forth in claim 1 , wherein the first and second network segments each have a different number of wavelengths.
5. The system as set forth in claim 1 , wherein the first and second network segments each have a different number of subcarrier channels.
6. The system as set forth in claim 1 , wherein the interconnected network segments are selected from the group consisting of: access networks, passive optical networks, local area networks, enterprise networks, metro area networks, wide area networks, and wavelength division multiplexing networks.
7. The system as set forth in claim 6 , wherein the interconnected network segments each have a network topology selected from the group consisting of: mesh, arbitrary mesh, ring, star, and tree.
8. The system according to claim 1 wherein frequency spacing between the first and second subcarriers of the digital subcarrier multiplexing technology are to a symbol rate carried by each channel.
9. The system according to claim 1 wherein the first and second subcarriers perform sub-wave length multiplexing.
10. The system according to claim 1 wherein the bridging component provides communication between the first and second network segments without a digital buffer.
11. A system of interconnected network segments, the system comprising:
a first network segment incorporating a digital subcarrier multiplexing technology and having a first digital subcarrier cross-connect switch;
a second network segment incorporating the digital subcarrier multiplexing technology and having a second digital subcarrier cross-connect switch;
a digital subcarrier bridging component interposed between the first and second digital subcarrier cross-connect switches such that a plurality of subcarrier circuits extend substantially seamlessly across both the first and second network segments; and
wherein the digital subcarrier multiplexing technology is operable to carry multiple high-speed data channels via frequency division multiplexing.