Queues are commonly used as a means to resolve conflicts for people who compete for the same resources. Constructing a queue for people might be as easy as writing down a name list. However, constructing a queue for non-stopping photons appears to be a challenging problem. The need for constructing optical queues that store optical packets (composed of a train of photons) is driven by the recent advances in optical transmission technologies. As the transmission speed of optical links has been increased so rapidly, the traditional approach of converting optical packets back to electronic packets and storing packets in electronic memories becomes very costly.
High Speed Networking Technologies (Short Film)