Advanced photonic routing sub-systems with efficient routing control

In recent years, there has been much interest in the development of optical switches which can route optical signals from different input guides to different outputs based on thermo-optic and electro-optic technologies. Such switches, which can be reconfigured on millisecond and microsecond timescales, have already attracted commercial interest. However switches which are able to reconfigure on the nanosecond timescales required for packet switching have been more challenging and only in recent years, have router concepts been devised to allow lossless routers to be constructed able to switch on nanosecond timescales with more than 16×16 ports. This paper will therefore review the advances that have occurred to allow such operation and then describe recent studies that have begun to determine the electronic control and functionality required to enable full and practical operation of such switches in high performance networks.This research has received funding from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the INTERNET Project, STAR and COPOS II grants and the European Commission under FP7 grant agreement ICT 257210 PARADIGM.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICTON.2015.719339