Demonstration of an optical-label switching router with multicast and contention resolution at mixed data rates

This letter experimentally demonstrates a scalable optical-label switching router architecture that supports a limited multicast function. A semiconductor-optical-amplifier-based Mach-Zehnder interferometer wavelength converter performs multiwavelength conversion for multicast at 10 Gb/s by cross-phase modulation. With a 2.5-Gb/s unicast channel, the experiment also demonstrates contention resolution in the wavelength domain at mixed data rates.