Studies On All Optical Signal Processing In The Optical Packet Switched Networks

Along with the advent of information age, various telecommunication services are explosively growing. An important trend in optical communication is the migration of the research from the traditional optical transmissions to the All-optical Switching Networks, aiming at the efficiency and agility instead of ultra-high rate and ultra-high capacity. Optical Packet Switching (OPS) network is believed to be the future developing direction, in which the realization of all-optical switching will not only overcome the electrical bottleneck, but offer the network dominances of scalability, ultra-high speed, transparency, switching granularity diversity and high resources efficiency etc. In all-optical switched network, all-optical signal processing is essential, and optical logics are key components. All optical label swapping technologies are now attracting much interest for combining the Multiple Protocol Label Switch (MPLS) and the Generalized Multiple Protocol Label Switch (GMPLS) with optical networks, and now focus is on the optical label format and the separation technologies.This dissertation surveys several key issues in OPS networks, including all-optical logic gate, optical label extraction, payload separation and self-synchronization.The works are listed in the following,1. A novel all-optical Exclusive OR (XOR) logic scheme based on semiconductor optical amplifiers in Mach-Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI) is proposed for the first time, which has no additional input beam or clock signal as probe. The operation mechanism of the scheme is investigated and analyzed theoretically. To assess the performance of the XOR, we defined and calculated metrics characterizing of switching such as Contrast Ratio (CR) and Amplitude Modulation (AM) and examine the pattern effect of the XOR in details.