<title>Demonstration of optical packet switching using optical-label switching technologies</title>

Abstract

This paper discusses optical-label switching and an experimental demonstration of high-speed all-optical packet switching with all-optical label-swapping capabilities. The subcarrier optical-label content was optically extracted and compared against the forwarding table, which induced packet forwarding as well as label-swapping decisions. The all- optical label processing technique was immune from dispersion induced fading and polarization induced degradation effects. The packet switching was accomplished by a combination of rapidly tunable wavelength conversion and a uniform-loss cyclic frequency (ULCF) 8 X 8 arrayed waveguide grating router (AWGR). The packet routing system achieved 600 psec switching time with a forwarding decision time of 250 nsec. All optical label swapping incorporated optical subcarrier filtering using fiber Bragg gratings. Accumulated packet-by- packet Bit-Error-Rate measurements confirm the successful and low-penalty packet routing with label swapping technique, while maintaining optical transparency for the data payload.