Research on the Scalability of All-Optical Switches in the OLS Networks

Optical transport networks are developing rapidly to cope with ever increasing traffic requirements. With the advent of new technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, cloud computing and tactile internet, existing infrastructure of optical network should be improved substantially. Taking into account a continuous trend of exponential traffic growth, telecommunication operators should pay attention to global data volume. In this paper, we present the structure of optical label switched (OLS) network based on all-optical switches. The investigation of these nodes is completed from the side of overall optical transport network scalability. Scalability parameter directly influences on the latency, reliability and power consumption of optical transport network. In this paper, we consider the two key solutions for optical switching based on electro-optic and acousto-optic effects. Latency, insertion loss, system complexity of all-optical switches are investigated according to the scalability parameter of the optical transport network.