The future of the Internet will be optical, according to engineer Ben Yoo at the University of California, Davis. Yoo is leading a team to build a trial optical Internet system, to be tested on the UC Davis campus later this year.

Optical networks use light pulses to transmit data instead of electrons. Most long-distance communications systems already use fiber-optic cable, but the light signals are turned back into electronic signals when they reach routers and switching points. These optical-to-electronic connections are a major bottleneck.

The UC Davis team is developing an all-optical router, which can switch "packets" of data made of light pulses in the same way that an electronic router handles data packets.

Existing optical switches use tiny mirrors to redirect light pulses. Yoo's router takes a different approach, switching light pulses by changing their wavelength. This technology potentially allows much faster switching than mirror-based technologies, said Yoo.

The optical Internet could achieve speeds of 10 terabits (10 million megabits) per second, Yoo said. Importantly, latency -- the length of time a data packet waits in a router before being sent on its way -- is much lower than that of electronic routers, he said. Packets spend a brisk 100 nanoseconds in the optical router, while lazing for several microseconds in the best available electronic routers.

The basics of Yoo's optical router were presented at the Optical Fiber Communication 2001 conference in Anaheim last month.

Future expansion of the test network to UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and UC Merced is included in the proposed Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). Funding for CITRIS was included by Gov. Gray Davis in the proposed state budget for 2001-2002.

More information: .

Media contacts:
-- Ben Yoo, Electrical and Computer Engineering, (530) 752-7063, yoo@ece.ucdavis.edu
-- Andy Fell, News Service, (530) 752-4533, ahfell@ucdavis.edu