A. Jourdan et al., DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A FULLY RECONFIGURABLE ALL-OPTICAL CROSSCONNECT FOR HIGH-CAPACITY MULTIWAVELENGTH TRANSPORT NETWORKS, Journal of lightwave technology, 14(6), 1996, pp. 1198-1206
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.