Experimental demonstrations of all-optical networking functions for WDM optical networks

The deployment of optical networks will enable high capacity links between users but will introduce the problems associated with transporting and managing more channels. Many network functions should be implemented in optical domain; main reasons are: to avoid electronic processing bottlenecks, to achieve data-format and data-rate independence, to provide reliable and cost efficient control and management information, to simultaneously process multiple wavelength channel operation for wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical networks.; The following novel experimental demonstrations of network functions in the optical domain are presented:; Variable-bit-rate recognition of the header information in a data packet. The technique is reconfigurable for different header sequences and uses optical correlators as look-up tables. The header is processed and a signal is sent to the switch for a series of incoming data packets at 155 Mb/s, 622 Mb/s, and 2.5 Gb/s in a reconfigurable network.; Simultaneous optical time-slot-interchange and wavelength conversion of the bits in a 2.5-Gb/s data stream to achieve a reconfigurable time/wavelength switch. The technique uses difference-frequency-generation (DFG) for wavelength conversion and fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) as wavelength-dependent optical time buffers.; The WDM header recognition module simultaneously recognizing two header bits on each of two 2.5-Gbit/s WDM packet streams. The module is tunable to enable reconfigurable look-up tables.; Simultaneous and independent label swapping and wavelength conversion of two WDM channels for a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) network. Demonstration of label swapping of distinct 8-bit-long labels for two WDM data channels is presented.; Two-dimensional code conversion module for an optical code-division multiple-access (O-CDMA) local area network (LAN) system. Simultaneous wavelength conversion and time shifting is achieved to enable flexible code conversion and increase code re-use among different LANs.