An all-optical grooming switch to interconnect access and metro ring networks

Abstract

A novel switch concept is introduced that offers transparent optical grooming of 10 and 40 Gb/s traffic in an access network onto a metro core ring network operated at 130 Gb/s traffic. Key functionalities of the router are the traffic aggregation with time-slot interchanging (TSI) functionality, the TDM to WDM demultiplexing of the high-speed channel into lower bit-rate tributaries as well as multi-wavelength all-optical 2R regeneration of several highest-speed signals.