Exploitable results Optical packet switching The project defines, develops and assesses the concept of optical packet switching and routing networks capable of providing transparency to the payload bit rate, using optical packets of fixed duration with low bit rate headers, to simplify processing at the network/node interfaces. The system concepts employ switch architectures using photonic techniques (space and wavelength switching for routing and multiplexing, time switching using optical fibre buffers), to perform packet routing, multiplexing and buffering. Use of electronics is reserved for the switch control, where speed is not a limiting factor. The concepts are validated in experimental testbeds built from state-of-the-art photonic technology. A demonstration of benefits of transparent optical packet layer within an all-optical network reference structure includes the following results: first conclusive results showing high transmission efficiency and traffic smoothing by an asynchronous transmission mode (ATM)/Optical Transparent Packet Interworking Unit with optical packet format defined; assessment of switching node performance and synchronization schemes; exploitation of wavelength domain in network and switch node; world state of the art performance of photonic devices and modules, successfully tested in trials; regenerative and bit rate transparent monolithically integrated interferometric all-optical wavelength converters; fast optical gates operating over the whole erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA) range using clamped gain semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA); low insertion loss, high speed electro-optic space switches; basic principles of the switch blocks explored up to 20 Gb/s and partial operation of interfacing block architectures demonstrated; wavelength routing switch demonstrator now sufficiently equipped to demonstrate 4x4 wavelength-based packet outing at 2.5 Gb/s and 622 Mb/s real-time header recovery; demonstration of 160 Gb/s throughput with a sub-equipped 16x16 Broadcast-and-Select switch testbed. Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
