Patent ID: 8031598

Claim:
A method of burst switching comprising: receiving at a core controller of a fast-switching optical core node, connecting to a plurality of edge nodes, flow-rate requirements for a set of data streams, each data stream defined by a source edge node and a destination edge node; determining, for said each data stream, a respective burst size; determining, for said each data stream, a respective inter-burst interval; presenting said respective burst size and said respective inter-burst interval to a scheduler for determining instants of time at which bursts belonging to said each data stream are to be received at the optical core node; communicating indications of said respective burst size and said instants of time to a source edge node of said each data stream; receiving, at each edge node, data packets of arbitrary sizes from respective data sources; associating each data packet with a data stream from among a number S, S>1, of predefined data streams; segmenting each data packet into data segments each of a predefined maximum size; storing said data segments and respective sizes into a data memory organized into K memory segments, K>S, each for storing a data segment; and storing in at least one control memory: two stream-tracking arrays each having S entries and indicating an address in said data memory of a front data segment and a last data segment belonging to each of said S data streams; a linkage array having K entries indicating addresses in said data memory of intervening data segments for each data stream; and an occupancy tracking array indicating unused segments of said data memory.