A prototype circuit-switched multi-wavelength optical metropolitan-area network

This paper presents a progress report on Rainbow-I, a prototype optical network based on wavelength-division multiplexing. Rainbow-I supports full-duplex circuit-switched interconnection of up to 32 workstations over a diameter of 25 km, at sustained bit rates of up to 300 Mb/s per connection, allowing a total network capacity of 9.6 Gb/s. Different connections are transparent to each other and may use different protocols and bit rates.