An Experimental Validation of a Wavelength-Striped, Packet Switched, Optical Interconnection Network

We experimentally validate a complete optical packet switched interconnection network, implementing the SPINet architecture. The scalable photonic integrated network (SPINet) architecture capitalizes on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) to provide very large transmission bandwidths, simplify network design, and reduce the network's power dissipation. Contention resolution is performed in the optical domain, and a novel physical layer acknowledgement protocol is employed to mitigate the associated latency and performance penalties. Moreover, the SPINet architecture is specifically designed to enable on-chip integration by not using any kind of optical delay lines. Experiments presented include a complete functionality verification, error-free routing of 80 Gb/s wavelength-striped optical packets (8 wavelengths each modulated at 10 Gb/s) with a bit-error rate (BER) better than 10(-12), and novel performance-enhancement techniques such as path adjustments and load balancing.