P. Gavignet et al., DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A FIBER DELAY-LINE OPTICAL BUFFER FOR MULTIGIGABIT PHOTONIC SWITCHING FABRICS, European transactions on telecommunications, 7(1), 1996, pp. 103-107
Full photonic packet switching fabrics require memories, which are not
available today in the optical domain: therefore, an alternative is t
he use of optical buffers based on fibers used as delay lines. This le
tter reports the optimised implementation of such a buffer operated in
a multiwavelength regime and accessed by fast optical gates. The buff
er operating principles and two different implementation structures ar
e first briefly presented. Then differential delays and influence on b
it error rate performance are discussed on the basis of test results w
ithin a 4 x 4 photonic packet switching matrix handling ATM cells at 2
.488 Gbit/s. The results demonstrate that fiber delay lines are a simp
le, potentially cost-effective solution to implement buffering within
highspeed photonic packet switching systems, adopting current optical
technology.