Nowadays, optical fiber is widely used in several areas, especially in communication networking. The main reason is that optical fiber has low attenuation and high bandwidth. However, the switching functionality is performed in the electrical domain (inside the router), thus we have transmission delays in the network lanes. In this study we explore the possibility of developing a hardware “plug-in” that can be connected in parallel with routers of the network enabling the router with “plug-in” to let it bypass time-critical traffic. We researched different switching techniques for optical fibers and realized it would be an expensive endeavor to create one for a large number of wavelength/connections, thus, we scaled it down to prove the concept “plug-in” where we use fiber optical switches and Mux/Demuxes for our design.
With our chosen optical components, we were able to bypass the routers (layer 3 switches) in our test environment and switch between different users to chose which one has the direct link. The conclusion can be drawn that it is possible to create such a “plug-in” which could be used by ISPs, to provide a faster lane to consumers with less modification of existing networks.