Abstract

Research in photonic packet switching^1–4 is aimed at developing techniques and technologies to route packets without passing the packets directly through an electronic layer. Optoelectronic conversion at every switching point can become costly and difficult to perform as the number of wavelengths, the packet bit rates and the aggregate number of packets per second increases. The prospect of creating a photonic packet switched network rests on overcoming multiple technological hurdles, some of which require advances in optical technologies and their integration. In this talk we will review all-optical label swapping architectures, the associated packet coding techniques and label swapping technologies. Research results from a DARPA NGI program at UCSB will be described as well as results from other AOLS research programs.

© 2002 Optical Society of America