Scalable and agnostic optical packet switch sub-system for optical packets with multiple modulation formats and data rates

We present a scalable, low latency optical packet switch sub-system that is capable to switch optical packets with multiple modulation formats. The optical packet switch sub-system employing in-band labeling to allow for transparent routing of packets with multiple data formats and data bit-rates. Packets employing in-band labels can be processed without the need to reconfigure the label processor and the switch when changing data format and bit-rate. The label processor is based on asynchronous optical signal processing in combination with a simple electronic combinatory network. This makes the label processor capable to process a large number of labels with low latency time (<;3 ns) without complicated and power hungry high speed packet clock recovery and serializer/deserializer circuits. Results show error-free operation of 1 × 64 and eventually 1 × 4096 by using a fat tree configuration optical packet switch subsystems for 160 Gb/s RZ-OOK, 320 Gb/s NRZ-OOK, 120 (12 × 10) Gb/s DPSK and 480 (12 × 40) Gb/s OFDM multi-wavelength packets. Photonic integrated devices required for scaling the optical packet switch sub-systems will be reviewed.