All-optical address recognition and self-routing in a 250 Gbit/s packet-switched network

The authors report the first demonstration of all-optical address recognition and self-routing of photonic packets for the case where the packet bit period is only 4 ps, corresponding to a 0.25 Tbit/s bandwidth optical network. An ultrafast all-optical device, known as a terahertz optical asymmetric demultiplexer (TOAD), was used to read the address information encoded in a packet header, which in turn was used to route the packet. The bit error rate at the switch output was measured to be less than 10^-9