ARCHITECTURE AND PERFORMANCE OF A BROADCAST AND SELECT PHOTONIC SWITCH

A new photonic packet switch based on wavelength encoding of informati on and on the broadcast-and-select principle for routing is presented. A suitable management of a set of fiber delay Lines to allow all-opti cal output queuing is performed through electronic control. Implementa tion and traffic aspects are analyzed. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the feasibility of the switch and its future evolution, achieved by a rack-mounted subequipped demonstrator. Different design options are discussed in order to achieve a global terabit per second capacity. Performance is evaluated by simulation under the typical tr affic conditions that arise in the broadband communication environment . (C) 1998 Academic Press.