An Ultrafast 1 x M All-optical WDM Packet-Switched Router based on the PPM Header Address

This paper presents an all-optical 1 x M WDM router architecture for packet routing at multiple wavelengths simultaneously, with no wavelength conversion modules. The packet header address adopted is based on the pulse position modulation (PPM) format, thus enabling the use of only a singlebitwise optical AND gate for fast header address correlation. It offers multicast as well as broadcast capabilities. It is shown that a high speed packet routing at 160 Gb/s can be achieved with a low channel crosstalk (CXT) of ~ -27 dB at a channel spacing of greater than 0.4 THz and a demultiplexer bandwidth of 500 GHz.

Keywords:

Wavelength division multiplexing , packet switching , pulse position modulation , address correlation , symmetric Mach-Zehnder , optical switch