Patent ID: 7369765

Claim:
A method for communicating optical traffic in a network comprising a plurality of network nodes, the method comprising: receiving traffic to be added to the network at a network node, the network operable to communicate received traffic in an optical signal comprising a plurality of channels; determining a data rate and one or more destination nodes of the received traffic; assigning the received traffic to one or more particular channels of the plurality of channels of the optical signal based on the determined data rate and the one or more destination nodes; configuring one or more of the network nodes to process the traffic contained in the assigned channels based on the data rate and the one or more destination nodes of the optical traffic; and communicating the traffic through network in the assigned channels of the optical signal based on the determined data rate and the one or more destination nodes; wherein when the data rate is determined to be greater than 5 Gbps and at least a portion of the received traffic is determined to be destined for a single destination node: assigning the traffic destined for the single destination node to one channel of the optical signal; configuring the single destination node to pass the traffic in at least one channel of a first copy of the optical signal generated at the destination node through a filter, to terminate the traffic in a second copy of the optical signal generated at the destination node, and to forward the at least one channel of the passed traffic in the first copy generated at the single destination node to one or more local clients associated with the single destination node; and communicating the optical traffic as point-to-point traffic to the single destination node.