Scalable and agnostic optical packet switch sub-system for optical packets with multiple modulation formats and data rates

Abstract

We present a scalable, low latency optical packet switch sub-system that is capable to switch optical packets with multiple modulation formats. The optical packet switch sub-system employing in-band labeling to allow for transparent routing of packets with multiple data formats and data bit-rates. Packets employing in-band labels can be processed without the need to reconfigure the label processor and the switch when changing data format and bit-rate. The label processor is based on asynchronous optical signal processing in combination with a simple electronic combinatory network. This makes the label processor capable to process a large number of labels with low latency time (<3 ns) without complicated and power hungry high speed packet clock recovery and serializer/deserializer circuits. Results show error-free operation of 1 × 64 and eventually 1 × 4096 by using a fat tree configuration optical packet switch subsystems for 160 Gb/s RZ-OOK, 320 Gb/s NRZ-OOK, 120 (12 × 10) Gb/s DPSK and 480 (12 × 40) Gb/s OFDM multi-wavelength packets. Photonic integrated devices required for scaling the optical packet switch sub-systems will be reviewed.

All-Optical Packet Switching and Label Rewriting for Data Packets Beyond 160 Gb/s

“…This will lead to a very large ð2 25 Þ number of addresses. This was partially verified in [21], where by using fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) with a À3-dB BW of 0.06 nm, six labels were inserted/extracted with no noticeable penalty. Note that if the payload data rate increases above 160 Gb/s (i.e., 320 or 640 Gb/s), a larger number of labels can be allocated in the payload spectrum.…”

“…For the DPSK multiwavelength packets, we use the same label wavelengths, but they are spectrally located in the notches of the spectra of the multiwavelength payload [see Fig. 1(b)] [21]. Each label is on-off keying (OOK) encoded and has a binary value: The label value is B1[ if the label is attached to the payload, and the label value is B0[ if no label is attached to the payload.…”