Fast tunable filter enables packet switching on all-optical network

Nina L. Taranenko; Stephen C. Tenbrink; Vladimir Katsman; Kevin Hsu

doi:10.1117/12.343757

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26 March 1999 Fast tunable filter enables packet switching on all-optical network

Nina L. Taranenko, Stephen C. Tenbrink, Vladimir Katsman, Kevin Hsu

Proceedings Volume 3620, Integrated Optics Devices III; (1999) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.343757
Event: Optoelectronics '99 - Integrated Optoelectronic Devices, 1999, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

A fast tunable filter enables a different switching technology to be implemented for an all-optical network. The fiber Fabry- Perot tunable filter works fast enough (three orders of magnitude faster than commercially available Fabry-Perot filters) to allow packet switching to be implemented on an experimental all-optical wavelength-division-multiplexed packet-switched network. The system uses a broadcast-and- select design, in which each node transmits at a Gb/s at dedicated wavelength. The data is transmitted over the passive-star network to all other nodes. The receiver at each node scans through all the wavelengths and selects signals addressed for that node. The major challenge of combining packet switching with the optical network is the tuning at the receiver that must be performed in microseconds, as opposed to milliseconds. The use of the optical filter provides a technical breakthrough for the bottleneck of high-speed packet switching. Another challenge of fast optical packet switching is clock-recovery and synchronization of the packets. Conventional circuits are inadequate when a fast clock recovery for the short length packets is required because they need thousands bits to lock on. We have developed a system for fast clock recovery on packet-by-packet basis using a surface acoustic wave filter for narrow band filtering. The combined optical and electronic components recover the clock circuit as fast as several hundred bits.

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Nina L. Taranenko, Stephen C. Tenbrink, Vladimir Katsman, and Kevin Hsu "Fast tunable filter enables packet switching on all-optical network", Proc. SPIE 3620, Integrated Optics Devices III, (26 March 1999); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.343757

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