A Novel All-Optical Routing Architecture for Optical Packet Switched Networks

Increasing bandwidth demand, mostly driven by the Internet Protocol (IP), has made researchers consider to deploy all-optical devices into packet switched networks. Despite huge bandwidth of the optical communication links (optical fiber) the usable capacity is limited due to bottlenecks (congestions) at the switching nodes. In this paper, a novel all-optical routing architecture is proposed for optical packet switched networks. In the design, practical optical devices (gratings, threshold elements, optical delays, and couplers) have been improved and exploited in order to integrate into an all-optical routing device. The system has been implemented and simulated by using an photonics simulation package (VPI-Virtual Photonics). The packets conveying a three-bit routing information tag at the bit rate of 10 Gbps have been successfully routed between two links. Some of the components are standard tools of the simulation package and some needed to be designed using the transfer function or theory developed in the literature. Noise and losses associated to the nonideal nature of the components are considered in the simulation as well.