Design and analysis of optical flow-switched networks

In the four decades since optical fiber was introduced as a communications medium, optical networking has revolutionized the telecommunications landscape. It has en-abled the Internet as we know it today, and is central to the realization of Network-Centric Warfare in the defense world. Sustained exponential growth in communica-tions bandwidth demand, however, is requiring that the nexus of innovation in optical networking continue, in order to ensure cost-effective communications in the future. In this thesis, we present Optical Flow Switching (OFS) as a key enabler of scalable future optical networks. The general idea behind OFS-agile, end-to-end, all-optical connections-is decades old, if not as old as the field of optical networking itself. However, owing to the absence of an application for it, OFS remained an under-developed idea-bereft of how it could be implemented, how well it would perform, and how much it would cost relative to other architectures. The contributions of this thesis are in providing partial answers to these three broad questions. With respect to implementation, we address the physical layer design of OFS in the metro-are