Patent ID: 8089993

Claim:
A sliceable router, comprising: a. a forwarding engine to forward packets based on a plurality of virtual packet interfaces; b. control packet queues coupled to the forwarding engine; c. a routing engine coupled to the forwarding engine that disseminates each virtual interface routing information independently and simultaneously; d. wherein the virtual interfaces share an optical orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OOFDMA)-based programmable transceiver for interface virtualization, wherein each virtual packet interface with different IP address works as one physical transmission pipe and wherein the routing engine provides a guaranteed bandwidth for each virtual link, and changeable in real-time manner through signaling or routing protocols and wherein the routing engine splits one high-speed optical link into multiple low-speed virtual links in a router for the purpose of bandwidth virtualization (bandwidth sliceable); and e. one or more conventional physical packet interfaces coupled to the forwarding engine; f. a virtual link controller coupled to the virtual packet interfaces; g. a plurality of encoders coupled to the virtual link controller, each encoder coupled to a sub-carrier mapping unit for mapping the virtual packet interfaces to sub-carriers in OOFDMA transmission; h. a plurality of decoders coupled to the virtual link controller, each decoder coupled to a sub-carrier demapping (demodulator) unit for demapping sub-carriers to the virtual packet interfaces in OOFDMA transmission; i. an OOFDMA transmitter coupled to the sub-carrier mapping unit; and j. an OOFDMA receiver coupled to the sub-carrier demapping unit (demodulator).