Abstract

Future broadband networks are expected to utilise WDM and optical switching to increase the network capacity and flexibility [1]-[3]. Furthermore, ATM is selected as standard for future broadband services, hence, optical packet/ATM switches [4,5] for WDM networks are of considerable interest. Of major concern for such all optical switches is the optical buffering as well as the complexity of the space-switch block addressing the optical buffers. We show, that by implementing tuneable optical wavelength converters (TOWC) the number of delay-lines in the buffer can be reduced and thereby also the size of the space-switch block. Based on measured features for semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) gates that are used to build the space-switch, we predict that a 16x16 switch with 4 or 8 wavelength channels is feasible.

© 1995 Optical Society of America