Advances in photonic packet switching: an overview

The current fast-growing Internet traffic is demanding more and more network capacity every day. The concept of wavelength-division multiplexing has provided us an opportunity to multiply network capacity. Current optical switching technologies allow us to rapidly deliver the enormous bandwidth of WDM networks. Photonic packet switching offers high-speed, data rate/format transparency, and configurability, which are some of the important characteristics needed in future networks supporting different forms of data. In this article we present some of the critical issues involved in designing and implementing all-optical packet-switched networks.