Photonic Switching Architectures and Their Comparison

Abstract

This paper reviews various architectures for photonic switching that have been proposed in the literature. The paper presents only the routing aspects of photonic switching, and in particular, the lithium niobate technology of the directional coupler. The paper: 1. provides the motivation for photonic switching, describes the various photonic switching elements, and discusses different control mechanisms required for photonic switching; 2. explains the principles of an electro-optic switch; 3. enumerates the architectural considerations involved in a photonic switch design; 4. discusses several space division switch architectures and compares their characteristics; 5. describes time division switching and different basic time division switching architectures. KeywordsTime SlotDirectional CouplerLithium NiobateChannel WaveguideSwitching ElementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.