OCDMA headers properties impact on an alloptical packet router module

Abstract

In this paper we assess experimentally the performance dependence of a Cross Gain Modulation all- optical router architecture module on power of Optical Code Division Multiple Access headers. The technique allows transparency of high data rate packets based on Cross Gain Modulation process, which is normally quite limited in terms of rate performance. I. INTRODUCTION Current telecommunications network traffic demands are evolving quite rapidly with the increasing number of services. This traffic growth, up to now, has been kept up with the widespread use of WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) transmission technology. However, the adoption of the latter technology has also meant that electronic packet routers will have to terminate a large number of WDM ports each carrying high data rate traffic. There is much evidence to suggest that the processing capabilities of electronic routers will not cope with the rate of traffic growth in the near future. This fact motivates the search of alternatives to route the traffic in the optical layer, which has significant speed performance advantages. There have been numerous efforts in the area of all- optical packet switching, where some of the functions of electronic routers are now performed directly in the optical layer. Most of these efforts come under the banner of GMPLS and aim to switch packets based on the contents of an optical label. One of the functions that any router, electrical or optical, has to perform, is to decode the contents of a packet header/label and look it up in a table, called LIB (label information base), to decide the appropriate destination port to forward the packet to, and replace the label with a new one. In most packet switching concepts and demonstrators presented so far, the header or lookup is most often implemented with electronics. However, some approaches are already doing it entirely on the optical domain