ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. It presents asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch architecture reviews with emphasis on the high-speed backbone switch. The chapter shows an innovatively structured ATM-based switch architecture that uses optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology. The architecture is based on a 3-stage switch network. Each stage is connected by optical WDM interconnection. The local network is based on an optical WDM broadcasting and selection network. The network can realize point-to-point and multicasting with more than 10 Mb/s transport capacity. The transit network is based on photonic ATM over WDM cross connects. Combining those two networks will yield a future backbone network. The photonic router has both Internet protocol packet switching capability and wavelength switching capability. These switching capabilities are adaptively used according to traffic demand fluctuations. The photonic router handles multi-protocol lambda switching, which is an extension of multi-protocol lambda switching.
