US Patent 7580641 Repeater and optical communication system

Disclosed is a repeater including: a recognizing unit to recognize a destination address of an optical packet from the optical packet which includes the destination address assigned in unit of bit and a bit indicating whether or not a plurality of destination addresses are assigned; an optical splitting unit to split the optical packet into a plurality of optical packets; and selecting units to select transmission channels for the split optical packets on the basis of recognition results by the recognizing units, respectively.