Hybrid circuit- and packet switched test-bed

Hybrid optical network architectures that combine beneficial properties of circuit and packet switching are attractive for multi-media networks. We have already proposed and reported the experimental demonstration of elements of a hybrid optical network architecture, the OpMiGua network. We now report experimental characterisation of a three-node OpMiGua network test-bed with ingress, core and egress nodes. The experiment confirms zero packet loss and jitter of the circuit switched Guaranteed Service Transport (GST) class of service (CoS) and shows how adding a packet switched Statistical Multiplexed (SM) CoS increases lightpath utilisation.