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Abstract — In this paper, we present a new hybrid switching architecture, termed as SLIP-IN, that combines electronic packet/burst with optical circuit switching. SLIP-IN architecture takes advantages of the pre-transmission idle periods of optical lightpaths and slips into them packets or bursts of packets. In optical circuit switching (wavelength-routing) networks, capacity is immediately hard-reserved upon the arrival of a setup message, but is only used after a round-trip time delay. This idle period is significant for optical multi-gigabit networks and can be used to transmit traffic of a lower class of service. In this paper, we present the main features and dependencies of the proposed hybrid switching architecture, and further we perform a detailed evaluation by conducting network wide simulation experiments on the NSFnet backbone topology. For this purpose, we have developed an extensive network simulator, where the basic features of the architecture were modeled. The extensive network study revealed that SLIP-IN architecture can achieve and sustain an adequate data rate with a finite worst case delay. Index Terms — Hybrid optical switching, optical wavelengt