Patent ID: 7076166

Claim:
An optical burst transmission system that transmits lightwaves having a plurality of pieces of data therein through transmission lines to destinations of the plurality of pieces of data, comprising: a data obtaining means for obtaining the plurality of pieces of data in sequence; a first optical signal generating means for generating Type 1 lightwaves from each piece of the data obtained, each Type 1 lightwave having a Type 1 wavelength that is unique to and corresponds to each of the destinations of each piece of the data, and having undergone an intensity modulation process according to a data value of each piece of the data; a second optical signal generating means for generating, by incorporating at least Type 2 lightwaves, a Type 3 lightwave using a smaller number of light emitting devices than the number of the Type 1 lightwaves generated by the first optical signal generating means, each of the Type 2 lightwaves (i) having a Type 2 wavelength that corresponds to each Type 1 wavelength and is apart from each Type 1 wavelength with an interval expressed as â€œFSR multiplied by Mâ€, wherein the FSR stands for Free Spectral Range and M is a natural number and (ii) having undergone the intensity modulation process according to a clock signal corresponding to the plurality of pieces of data; an outputting means for outputting a combination of the Type 1 lightwaves and the Type 3 lightwave; an optical routing means for receiving the combination of the lightwaves and extracting pairs of the lightwaves from the combination so that each pair is made up of one Type 1 lightwave and one particular Type 2 lightwave having the Type 2 wavelength, and guiding each pair to each of the transmission lines that is unique to and respectively corresponds to each of the Type 1 wavelengths of the Type 1 lightwaves extracted.