Optically-processed routing for fast packet switching

Electronic routing control of photonic switches is considered. The types of network architectures and routing strategies that the authors think are best-suited to optical processing are proposed, and a generic optical routing processor is described. Address-encoding schemes for optically controlling a photonic switching node are presented. The results of several experiments that have demonstrated optical control of a photonic switching node are reported. Potential applications of these photonic switching architectures are described.<>