BLAZELAN: A Photonic Network for Distributed and Parallel Processing

Communication in today's network experiences long delays mainly due to the overhead of software implementation of OSI-based communication protocols. With the introduction of optical fiber media (and photonic switching and processing) some of the functions of these protocals become obsolete or unnecessary (error detection of the data link, for example). 

The remaining functionality of these protocals needs to be implemented in hardware, if fast networking is the goal. One approach to hardware implementation of these protocols is to exactly replace pieces of software by hardware that performs the same function. 

A novel approach is to use some of the features of the optical media to provide the necessary functionality for higher levels (flow control on the data link and network layers, for example). We note that such an approach violates the ISO-OSI model.