Optical Packet Switching via FWM Processing of Time-Stacked Weight-2 Codes

We demonstrate recognition of time-stacked multiwavelength (M-
lambda
) weight-2 code labels using four-wave-mixing (FWM) sideband allocation and selective optical filtering. At the forwarding node, the labels are separated using a highly reflective fiber Bragg grating and the FWM terms are generated using a highly nonlinear semiconductor optical amplifier. We show successful forwarding of packets through a two-hop network. We report error-free transmission (bit-error rate
<
10
^-10
) of the payload through the entire network with less than 1.5-dB power penalty.