Demonstration of all-optical packet switching routers with optical label swapping and 2R regeneration for scalable optical label switching network applications

This paper investigates comprehensive operation and experimentation of an all-optical packet switching router with optical label swapping and reamplification and reshaping (2R) regeneration, capable of multihop operation and Internet protocol (IP)-client interoperability. In particular, the experiment demonstrates successful packet switching and transport up to 11 hops with 10(-9) bit-error rate and error-free up to four hops. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates the optical label switching (OLS) core router and edge routers working together to support IP-client-to-IP-client packet transport and switching across the optical label switching network. The edge router generates an optical label based on the IP header content of the packet and generates an optical label encoded packet, which subsequently ingresses into the OLS network. The optical label switching router (OLSR) forwards the packet with all-optical label swapping at each hop with 2R regeneration. The 2R regeneration leads to an experimentally measured negative penalty and a successful experimental demonstration of multihop cascaded OLSR operation with the edge routers interfacing with IP clients. The successful IP-client-to-IP-client packet forwarding via the edge routers and the cascaded multihop OLSR with all-optical label swapping indicate the viability of OLS in the scalable and transparent IP-over-optical Internet.