Designing a high speed optical packet switched network

Optical packet switching is foreseen as a future-proof technology for next generation optical networks, as it provides a solution for more efficient bandwidth utilization. Design issues concerning technological and architectural approaches for the deployment of optical packet switching in high-speed networks are examined. First the two different types of packet routers for the edge and the core are identified and the required elements are presented. Then issues concerning the header encoding extraction and switch control are discussed. Finally, a fast optical packet switch that can route asynchronous data traffic with variable length packets at 40 Gb/s is presented. The developed techniques for the header extraction scheme, the advanced control mechanism and the bit rate transparent and widely tunable wavelength conversion scheme are shown in detail.