Simultaneous all-optical packet manipulation and wavelength shifting in a reconfigurable WDM network

Wavelength shifting will potentially be important in future high-capacity, packet-switched, wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) networks. Wavelength shifting, which transfers data from one wavelength to another, is important because it allows for (i) the system-wide re-use of wavelengths in a WDM network with more users than available wavelengths, and (ii) the reconfiguration of wavelength-specific paths in a dynamic network when changing traffic patterns require data-packet rerouting at a switching node. In order to maintain high throughput, a dynamically reconfigurable WDM network may require all-optical manipulation of a transmitted Gbit/s data packet in addition to wavelength shifting. We will discuss the simultaneous operation of all-optical wavelength shifting with: (i) packet header replacement, and (ii) data format conversion.