Optical fiber ring communication system

Details Optical fiber ring communication system Optical fiber ring communication system

2000-09-12

2004-04-06

Negash, Kinfe-Michael (Department: 2633)

Optical communications

Multiplex

Optical local area network

C398S003000, C398S042000, C398S048000, C398S079000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06718139

ABSTRACT:

The present invention relates generally to optical fiber communication systems, and particularly to a system architecture for making efficient use of optical fiber communication rings and provided reliable logical connections between network nodes.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Fiber optic rings have been installed, and as of 1999 are in the process of being installed in many cities. These communication networks have the potential to provide low cost, high bandwidth connections within a geographical area of several miles, as well as low cost, high bandwidth connections to other communication networks, such as the Internet. To date, however, the equipment available for providing data communications over these networks has been sufficiently expensive that relatively little use is being made of these fiber optic networks.
The present invention provides a low cost system architecture that allows Fibre Channel (FC) and Gigabit Ethernet (GE) data streams to be seamlessly routed through such fiber optic ring networks with very high reliability, all while making efficient use of the available bandwidth.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
An optical fiber ring network includes a plurality of interconnected nodes, each pair of neighboring nodes being interconnected by a pair of optical fiber links. Using coarse wavelength division multiplexing, data is transmitted in both directions over each optical link, using a first optical wavelength &lgr;
1
to transmit data in a first direction over the link and a second optical wavelength &lgr;
2
to transmit data in a second, opposite direction over the link. The two optical wavelengths &lgr;
1
and &lgr;
2
differ by at least 10 nm.
In a preferred embodiment, each of the data streams transmitted over the optical link has a bandwidth of at least 2.5 Gbps. Further, each data stream has at least two logical streams embedded therein.
At each node of the network there is a link multiplexer that includes one or more link cards for coupling the link multiplexer to client devices, and one or more multiplexer units for coupling the link multiplexer to the optical links. Each link card includes frame buffers capable of storing numerous Fibre Channel frames that are being transmitted to and from the client device(s) coupled to that link card. The link card also includes flow control logic for pre-filling the frame buffers with frames of data before the receiving client devices send flow control messages to request their transmission. The combined effect of the frame buffers and flow control logic is that the full bandwidth of the links can be utilized even when the network nodes are very far apart and the client devices have small input data buffers.


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