DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A FULLY RECONFIGURABLE ALL-OPTICAL CROSSCONNECT FOR HIGH-CAPACITY MULTIWAVELENGTH TRANSPORT NETWORKS

The motivations and application framework for the introduction of all- optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission and routin g techniques in the transport network are presented, The requirements and functionalities of all-optical transparent routing nodes are discu ssed, and the physical architecture of a crossconnection node is propo sed, to meet these requirements. Optical devices suitable for the node implementation are compared, and first demonstrations of crossconnect ion function at data rates up to 10 Gb/s are given. These results brin g experimental evidence of the high potential of all optical routing n odes for actual implementation of multiwavelength transport networks.