High-speed digital optical networking

Photonic interconnection fabrics are now being introduced to allow greater information carrying speed and capacity and to reduce complexity. Ideally, these optical interconnection systems would emulate the advantageous features of electronic systems: modularity, cascadability, scalability and freedom from architectural constraints. However the first generations of photonic networks (based on 'transparent' wavelength routing or optical time-division multiplexing (OTDM)) fall far short of this ideal.