ULTRA-LOW LATENCY MULTI-PROTOCOL ROUTERS FOR THE NEXT GENERATION INTERNET

An ultra-low latency optical router with a peta-bit-per-second total aggregate switching bandwidth, that will scale to a total connectivity of 1000 by 1000, and beyond by modular upgrades, that utilizes advanced optical technologies to achieve such high capacity with two to three orders of magnitude less volume and power requirements than the electrical router counter part, that serves as a universal engine to other optical routers being developed by vendors and researchers today, that can function in the context of circuit-switching, flow-switching, burst-switching, and packet-switching, that uses advanced wavelength conversion technology to effectively achieve three methods of contention resolution in the router: deflection in wavelength, deflection in space, and buffering in time, and that interfaces a local network to the Supernet.