If optical routers are to become reality, we will need several new optical technologies, one of which is to build sufficiently large optical buffers. Building optical buffers for routers is daunting: Today's electronic routers often holdmillions of packets, which is well beyond the capabilities of optical technology. In this paper, we argue that two new results offer a solution. First, we show that the size of buffers in backbone routers can be made very small--just about 20 packets per linecard--at the expense of a small loss in throughput. Second, we show that integrated delay line optical buffers can store a few dozen packets on a photonic chip. With the combination of these two results, we conclude that future Internet routers could use optical buffers.
['Neda Beheshti', 'Emily F. Burmeister', 'Yashar Ganjali', 'John E. Bowers', 'Daniel J. Blumenthal', 'Nick McKeown']
Optical packet buffers for backbone internet routers