ALL-OPTICAL ADDRESS RECOGNITION AND SELF-ROUTING IN A 250GBIT S PACKET-SWITCHED NETWORK/

The authors report the first demonstration of all-optical address reco gnition and self-routing of photonic packets for the case where the pa cket bit period is only 4ps, corresponding to a 0.25Tbit/s bandwidth o ptical network. An ultrafast all-optical device, known as a terahertz optical asymmetric demultiplexer (TOAD), was used to read the address information encoded in a packet header, which in turn was used to rout e the packet. The bit error rate at the switch output was measured to be less than 10(-9).