Remote Control Of Optical Switches For Wavelength Path Relocation In Awg-Star Networks

Given that the number of devices with Internet access continues to rapidly increase, we see Internet traffic also steadily increasing. To accommodate such increases in Internet traffic, various technologies for realizing an expansion of communication capacity and efficiently consuming this capacity are actively being studied. One such technology for expanding communication capacity is wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), which is applicable not only to large-scale networks but also to local area networks (LANs). An optical device that uses WDM is the arrayed waveguide grating (AWG), which can provide wavelength paths to networks with full mesh topologies. In previous work, we proposed a network that could flexibly relocate wavelength paths employing optical switches for AWGs; however, the network management load was prohibitive because network administrators had to physically go where the optical switches were deployed to control the relocating wavelength paths. In this paper, we propose a remote control system for optical switches to reduce network management load. We evaluated the system performance of our remote control system using experimental networks in which we measured several network parameters. Another goal of our research was to support applications for the Internet of Things (IoT); we used a Raspberry Pi to evaluate our system, as such devices are major candidate IoT devices.