ABSTRACT
SUMMARY A rack-mounted prototype packet switch that makes use of wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) interconnect techniques has been developed. The switch has a maximum throughput of 320Gbit/s. It features a WDM star-based switch architecture, an electrical control circuit layer and a broad-bandwidth optical WDM layer. The basic characteristics of the broad bandwidth WDM layer, such as level diagram, transmission characteristics, 32-wavelength-channel switching, and highspeed optical gating within a 1.6-ns guard time, are described. Experimental results demonstrated that the switch can perform practical self-routing switch operations, such as address-extraction, optical buffering, and filtering for packet speeds of up to 10Gbit/s. The switch is promising for such applications as a terabit-per-second switching node in future WDM transport networks.
