From an architectural perspective with the main goal of reducing the effective traffic load in the network and thus gaining more operational efficiency, optical networks have been essentially remained the same in the recent two decades since the year 2000s with the success and then dominance of optical-bypass mode. In the optical-bypass-enabled network, the add/drop and cross-connect functions constitute the fundamental operations in handling the traffic at the optical layer, whose the underlying principle lies in the fact that in cross-connecting in-transit lightpaths over an intermediate node, such lightpaths must be guarded from each other in a certain dimension, be it the time, frequency or spatial domain, to avoid interference, which is treated as destructive. In view of the rapid progresses in the realm of optical computing enabling the precisely controlled interference between optical channels for various computing capabilities, we envision a different perspective to turn the long-established wisdom in optical-bypass network around by putting the optical channel interference to a good use, resulting into the so-called optical-computing-enabled network. This paper presents two illustrative examples based on the optical aggregation and optical XOR operations which have been progressively maturing and thus, could be feasibly integrated into the current legacy infrastructure with possibly minimal disruptions. We then propose a detailed case study in formulating and solving the network coding-enabled optical networks, demonstrating the efficacy of the optical-computing-enabled network, and highlighting the unique challenges tied with greater complexities in network design problems, compared to optical-bypass counterpart

翻译：从以降低网络有效流量负载、提升运营效率为主要目标的架构视角来看，自2000年代光旁路模式取得成功并占据主导地位以来，光网络在近二十年间基本保持不变。在支持光旁路的网络中，上下路与交叉连接功能构成了光层处理流量的基本操作，其根本原理在于：在中间节点对传输中的光路进行交叉连接时，必须通过时间、频率或空间等维度将这些光路相互隔离，以避免被视为破坏性的干扰。鉴于光计算领域的最新进展已能实现光通道间精确受控的干扰以支持多种计算能力，我们提出一种全新视角，旨在颠覆光旁路网络中长期遵循的准则，转而积极利用光通道干扰，从而构建所谓的光计算赋能网络。本文基于光聚合与光异或（XOR）运算给出两个示例性应用——这些技术正日趋成熟，有望以最小改造代价整合至现有基础设施。随后，我们通过详细案例研究，阐述网络编码赋能光网络的建模与求解过程，验证光计算赋能网络的实际效能，并指出相较于传统光旁路网络，其在网络设计问题中因复杂度提升而面临的独特挑战。