Experimental Characteristics of Optical Crosspoint Switch Matrix and Its Applications in Optical Packet Switching

This paper presents the experimental results of the switching performances of the fast reconfigurable optical crosspoint switch (OXS) matrix. This paper demonstrates unicast optical packet switching for a 10-Gb/s payload at various modulation formats and a 155-Mb/s nonreturn-to-zero label. Reconfigurable time as fast as 2 ns is achieved because of the optimized control circuit and device fabrication. The power and wavelength dependence for the payload and the capability of multihop operation are investigated as well. The functionalities of the OXS acting as an optical switch and an optical buffer are demonstrated in the optical network node experiment. Very good switching property is obtained for the OXS, which clearly validates OXS as a potential technique for future high-speed Internet-protocol-overwavelength- division-multiplexing networks.