Optical switch

About: Optical switch is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 28538 publications have been published within this topic receiving 351176 citations.

Analysis of a dynamically wavelength-routed optical burst switched network architecture

Abstract: The concept of optical burst switching (OBS) aims to allow access to optical bandwidth in dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) networks at fractions of the optical line rate to improve bandwidth utilization efficiency. This paper studies an alternative network architecture combining OBS with dynamic wavelength allocation under fast circuit switching to provide a scalable optical architecture with a guaranteed QoS in the presence of dynamic and bursty traffic loads. In the proposed architecture, all processing and buffering are concentrated at the network edge and bursts are routed over an optical transport core using dynamic wavelength assignment. It is assumed that there are no buffers or wavelength conversion in core nodes and that fast tuneable laser sources are used in the edge routers. This eliminates the forwarding bottleneck of electronic routers in DWDM networks for terabit-per-second throughput and guarantees forwarding with predefined delay at the edge and latency due only to propagation time in the core. The edge burst aggregation mechanisms are evaluated for a range of traffic statistics to identify their impact on the allowable burst lengths, required buffer size and achievable edge delays. Bandwidth utilization and wavelength reuse are introduced as new parameters characterizing the network performance in the case of dynamic wavelength allocation. Based on an analytical model, upper bounds for these parameters are derived to quantify the advantages of wavelength channel reuse, including the influence of the signaling round-trip time required for lightpath reservation. The results allow to quantify the operational gain achievable with fast wavelength switching compared to quasistatic wavelength-routed optical networks and can be applied to the design of future optical network architectures.

All-optical switching in rubidium vapor.

Abstract: We report on an all-optical switch that operates at low light levels. It consists of laser beams counterpropagating through a warm rubidium vapor that induce an off-axis optical pattern. A switching laser beam causes this pattern to rotate even when the power in the switching beam is much lower than the power in the pattern. The observed switching energy density is very low, suggesting that the switch might operate at the single-photon level with system optimization. This approach opens the possibility of realizing a single-photon switch for quantum information networks and for improving transparent optical telecommunication networks.

Tiny Tera: a packet switch core

Abstract: Describes Tiny Tera: a small, high-bandwidth, single-stage switch. Tiny Tera has 32 ports switching fixed-size packets, each operating at over 10 Gbps (approximately the Sonet OC-192e rate, a telecom standard for system interconnects). The switch distinguishes four classes of traffic and includes efficient support for multicasting. We aim to demonstrate that it is possible to use currently available CMOS technology to build this compact switch with an aggregate bandwidth of approximately 1 terabit per second and a central hub no larger than a can of soda. Such a switch could serve as a core for an ATM switch or an Internet router. Tiny Tera is an input-buffered switch, which makes it the highest bandwidth switch possible given a particular CMOS and memory technology. The switch consists of three logical elements: ports, a central crossbar switch, and a central scheduler. It queues packets at a port on entry and optionally prior to exit. The scheduler, which has a map of each port's queue occupancy, determines the crossbar configuration every packet time slot. Input queueing, parallelism, and tight integration are the keys to such a high-bandwidth switch. Input queueing reduces the memory bandwidth requirements: When a switch queues packets at the input, the buffer memories need run no faster than the line rate. Thus, there is no need for the speedup required in output-queued switches.

Exciton–polariton spin switches

Abstract: An all-optical spin switch based on exciton–polaritons in a semiconductor microcavity is demonstrated. These results may lead to small and fast spin-based on-chip logic devices.

Optical Signal Processing

Abstract: : We studied optical processing techniques to detect and track frequency hopped radio signals in a dense electromagnetic environment by using cross-spectrum of two signals obtained from antenna elements spaced by one-half an RF wavelength. We decimate the array by retaining only every Mth element and scan the cross-spectrum past the decimated array. We therefore reduce the circuit complexity, but suffer some loss in system performance because we require more photodetector bandwidth to accommodate the scanning action. An extension of the decimated array concept is to decimate the reference waveform in the heterodyne spectrum analyzer. In this case, we generate only 64 optical probes in the Fourier domain instead of the 2048 that are normally required. The advantage is that all of the optical power in the reference beam can be concentrated into the reduced number of optical probes, thereby offsetting some of the intrinsic loss in performance experienced by the cross-spectrum analyzer. (JHD)