Abstract
An all-optical Manhattan Street Network (MSN), in which the data portion of a packet is maintained in an optically encoded format from the source to the destination, can be achieved by augmenting MSN with optical buffering. Augmenting MSN with optical buffering improves its performance significantly and reduce its complexity by reducing or even eliminating the need for optical-electrical conversions. The performance of an MSN with optical buffering is compared with that of an MSN in which only store-and-forward routing mechanism is used. The network is based on a novel 6x6 optical switching node.