Studies on all-optical deflection routing for all-optical packet-switched networks by using Fabry-Perot laser diodes for all-optical header processing

In this work, we present recent investigations in all-optical packet switching. We demonstrated experimentally that packets with binary-encoded address can be switched optically with all-optical bitwise header processing by using Fabry-Perot laser diodes. We then carried out experiments to show that packet contention can be re-solved all-optically by using deflection routing in a 2x2 switch. We then demonstrated theoretically that NxN deflection routing node can be constructed using the 2x2 deflection routing nodes as building blocks. Since the performance of a deflection routing node can be significantly enhanced even with the use of very limited buffers, we also have investigated experimentally the feasibility of all-optically buffer.;In order to simplify the demand on optical signal processing, we have adopted in our previous work a novel self-routing address format in which every output port of all the nodes in a network is identified by a single bit in the address. Thus the length of the address is proportional to the size of the network. In this thesis, in order to shorten the address length I demonstrated that packets with binary-encoded address can be properly routed all-optically. The length of the address can be reduced from N to log 2N bits where N is the total number of output ports in the network.;We then studied the use of deflection routing to resolve packet contention problem. We considered a 2x2 node which consists of a header extractor, a header processor, a 2x2 Cross/Bar switching cell, and an add/drop module. The contention resolution strategy is encoded in the switch configuration. We then demonstrated theoretically that an NxN deflection routing node can be constructed using the demonstrated 2x2 deflection routing nodes.;It is well-known that the throughput-delay performance of deflection routing network can be significantly improved by adding buffer to the nodes of the network. We therefore study all-optical buffers and demonstrated that an optically controlled memory using a photonic crystal fiber based nonlinear optical loop mirror for all-optical packet-switched networks. The 10 Gb/s data can be stored in the buffer up to a period of 2.5 micros.