The sensing and control of cell competition in an OATM-based switching system

We demonstrate an all-optical circuit which senses and controls cell competition in an optical asynchronous transfer mode-based switching system. The operation of the circuit has been confirmed by experiment. When cells injected into a switch from multiple channels overlap in time, the circuit generates buffer-control and switch-control signals to prevent collision between the cells. The respective signals introduce the cell with a lower order of priority to a buffer and pass the cell of higher priority to the next switch.