Abstract. We present an all-optical ring network architecture with logarithmic shortcuts and a systolic routing protocol for it. An r-dimensional optical ring network with logarithmic shortcuts (ORLS) consists of n = 2r nodes and r2r optical links. We study a systolic routing protocol that is based on cyclic changes of the states of routers and scheduled sendings of packets. The protocol ensures that no electro-optical conversions are needed in the intermediate routing nodes and all the packets injected into the routing machinery reach their targets without collisions. A workoptimal routing of an h-relation is achieved with a reasonable size of h ∈ Ω(n log n).