Abstract

Wavelength channel reconfiguration time, signaling transmis-sion time, and signaling processing time may limit the performance of a high-speed packet-switched WDMA network. Wavelength reconfiguration time can be shortened by, for example, using the combination of a wavelength-demultiplexer, a photodetector array, and electronic selector fabrics at the receiving site, and fixed-wavelength transmitters at the transmitting sites.¹ To reduce the signaling transmission and processing time, a signaling technique of using subcarrier-multiplexed (SCM) headers was proposed to reduce the long delay in serially processing multiple users' headers, and to effectively separate the high-speed data payload (e.g., >Gbit/s) from the low-speed control header (e.g., <100 Mbit/s).² However, a long processing delay may still be incurred in using a SCM header because of the multiple bytes in the header that must be serially processed by a computer CPU or a logical circuit. To alleviate this processing load, we propose and experimentally demonstrated the feasibility of using parallelly processed subcarrier pilot-tones,³ in combination with an array of detectors and RF switches, to obtain an extremely short header transmission and processing time.

© 1996 Optical Society of America