Cascading switching nodes in data vortex optical packet interconnection network

Cascading of semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) based switching nodes has been studied experimentally in a recirculating loop test-bed of the data vortex packet interconnection network. The experimental results show that the signal bit-error-rates can still exceed 10/sup -9/ after 72 node hops, demonstrating the physical layer scalability of the data vortex network.