Patent ID: 7190899

Claim:
A method for providing high connectivity communications over an optical ring network operating in photonic time slots, comprising the steps of: generating a set of serial packets by a tunable laser, where each packet in said set is at a different wavelength and occupies a time slot of said time slots; stacking said set of serial packets to form a first composite packet to superimpose said packets within a time slot of said time slots to form a first composite packet; employing an optical crossbar switch of a first node of a core ring of said ring network to add said first composite packet, as a unit, into an empty time slot of a core ring of said network; dropping said first composite packet as a unit in a second node of said core ring of said ring network which second node is a destination node of said first composite packet, serializing said first composite packet at said second node into a received serial stream of packets; and distributing at least one packet of said received serial stream of packets.