All-optical label swapping, clock recovery, and 3R regeneration in 101-hop cascaded optical-label switching router networks

This paper experimentally demonstrates the cascaded operation of an optical-label switching router for up to 101 hops, with optical label swapping, optical clock recovery, and 3R regeneration (re-amplification, reshaping, and retiming) at each hop. The optical label swapping utilizes all-optical payload/label separation and label rewriting with subcarrier label. An interferometer wavelength converter enables the reshaping function, while the synchronous modulation driven by the optically recovered packet clock performs the retiming function. The optical label swapping and 3R regeneration enable the packets to traverse a large number of hops while maintaining the signal quality to support the scalability of the optical-label switching network.