The hardware and the communication protocol of a scalable optical ring have been designed. A hardware routing has been achieved on the network interface card to minimize data packet communication latency and a simplified communication protocol has been designed to reduce communication overheads. To reduce the data packet blocking probability and have a more efficient usage of the data link layer bandwidth, a virtual multi-channel transmission mechanism has been achieved. The network supports a maximum of 16 virtual channels for each physical data link. Time slots can be dynamically assigned to each virtual channel. Zero wait time has been achieved for the switching between different virtual channels.