ALL-OPTICAL SWITCHING FOR 100-GB/S AND BEYOND OPTICAL NETWORKS

With the drastically increasing traffic in optical backbone and metro networks, ultrahigh-capacity and cost-effective all-optical switching is anticipated. All-optical switching nodes based on 1xN wavelength selective switches (WSS's) are widely used in current optical networks. However, the existing architecture of multi-dimensional switching node based on 1xN WSS's is very complicated and costly. In this paper, we propose an NxN WSS architecture to tackle this problem, and address its optical design and application. Furthermore, we propose to introduce sub-wavelength-level all-optical switching technology into a network node or even the whole network, and demonstrate a petabit-scale switching node and a 100-Gb/s optical burst network, respectively.