Patent ID: 7181140

Claim:
A system for use in an optical switching network, comprising: an optical-to-electrical signal (OE) converter; an optical core switch (OCS) unit; an optical demultiplexer unit (DMUX) coupled to the OE converter and the OCS unit, wherein the DMUX is configurable to route a control signal and a data signal received via a plurality of optical input lines to the OE converter and the OCS unit, respectively, the data signal being a time division multiplexed (TDM) signal having at least a portion received at a first TDM input channel; an optical multiplexer unit (MUX) coupled to the OCS unit and couplable to a plurality of optical output lines that provide propagation paths for a plurality of TDM output channels; an optical signal generator (OSG) coupled to the DMUX, an ingress switching node to reserve a TDM time slot in one of the plurality of TDM output channels and to maintain a list of all used and available time slots of the plurality of TDM output channels; and a control unit coupled to the OCS unit, the OE converter and the OSG, the control unit to cause the OCS unit to route at least a portion of the data signal to the reserved TDM time slot of the TDM output channel of the plurality of TDM output channels via the MUX based on routing information contained in the control signal and to update the list of all used and available time slots when the ingress switching node reserves a TDM time slot.