One major area of research that deals with this issue is Optical Burst-Switching (OBS).
Packets are assembled at an ingress edge-node into bursts. A burst header pack (BHP) is sent before the burst to reserve resources at the optical switches along the path the burst will travel. The BHP must be converted to electronics along the path, but the data burst travels through the network optically, and only converted back to electronics at the egress edge-node.
There are a lot of issues plaguing OBS - primarily the performance of TCP, which suffers heavily due to the idiosyncrasies of the paradigm.
If you're interested in optical network research, definitely look into OBS.
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One major area of research that deals with this issue is Optical Burst-Switching (OBS). Packets are assembled at an ingress edge-node into bursts. A burst header pack (BHP) is sent before the burst to reserve resources at the optical switches along the path the burst will travel. The BHP must be converted to electronics along the path, but the data burst travels through the network optically, and only converted back to electronics at the egress edge-node. There are a lot of issues plaguing OBS - primarily the performance of TCP, which suffers heavily due to the idiosyncrasies of the paradigm. If you're interested in optical network research, definitely look into OBS.