Investigation and System Implementation of Flexible Bandwidth Switching for a Software-Defined Space Information Network

This paper proposes and experimentally demonstrates a hybrid switching system that provides flexible bandwidth allocation for future laser and microwave space information networks. First, a switching node structure is designed for laser and microwave hybrid links, and an optimized strategy of flexible bandwidth allocation is presented based on the traffic distribution. Then, we establish a reconfigurable light and microwave hybrid switching system based on microwave photonics. The experimental results indicate that the proposed system can realize microwave frequency conversion and photoelectric hybrid switching. Additionally, bandwidth resources can be allocated flexibly and the bit-error rate of the baseband data is less than 10
⁻⁹
. Furthermore, the simulation results of the proposed flexible bandwidth allocation strategy reveal that the spectrum utilization rate is more than 94% when the traffic is saturated.