Patent 7734176 was granted and assigned to Intel on June, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A system and method for a cell switching optical network. A block of data is buffered at an edge node and sliced into data slices. Slice headers are pre-appended to each data slice. The data slices are then scheduled for transmission onto an optical switching network during fixed time slots defined on a per carrier wavelength basis.