978-1-4244-3485-5/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE 1 All-Optical Packet Switching Techniques with Label Rewriting for Optical Packets at Bit-Rate Beyond 160 Gb/s

We present two all-optical packet switching techniques that utilize all-optical signal processing to implement the label processor and the label rewriter. The two techniques are based on two different paradigms. One is based on wavelength routing switching [1] and the other one on space routing switching [2]. Both techniques employ scalable and asynchronous label processor and label rewriter capable to process optical in-band labeling addresses. We demonstrate a 1×4 all-optical packet switch based on both techniques. We report for both technique experimental results showing the routing operation of the 160 Gb/s packets based on the processed in-band address information, and all-optical label erasing and new label insertion operation. Based on the experimental results, we discuss and compare both techniques in term of devices and bit-rate scalability, latency, power consumption, power penalty performance and cascadability as key parameters for the realization of an all-optical packet switching node. 1. RESULTS Figure 1 illustrates the input packet format. The input packets consist of a 160 Gb/s payload, with a pulse duration of 1.6 ps making the 20 dB bandwidth of the payload to be 5 nm. The packet address information is encoded by in-band labels. With this we mean that the wavelengths of the labels are chosen within the bandwidt