All-optical router with pulse-position modulation header processing in high-speed photonic packet switching networks

In future high-speed photonic packet switching networks, it is highly desirable to carry out robust all-optical header recognition to provide high-throughput routing. The authors present a pulse-position modulation header processing (PPM-HP) scheme, offering significantly reduced routing table size and employing a single bit-wise AND operation to carry out correlation of the packet header with the entire routing table entries. The downsized routing table also offers multiple transmission modes (unicast, multicast and broadcast) in the optical layer and improves core network scalability where the number of core/edge nodes could be altered without the need for changing the number of routing table entries. The authors present modelling and simulation of the packet switching router based on PPM-HP. Noise propagation and crosstalk incurred in a multiple-hop routing scenario are investigated. The simulation results are presented and compared with the theoretical calculations.