CORD-a WDM optical network: control mechanism using subcarrier multiplexing and novel synchronization solutions

Stanford University is implementing and investigating CORD, a 2.488 Gb/s/λ WDM ATM packet-switched network experiment. CORD performs optical contention resolution at the receiver using optical switches and delay lines. CORD uses the multichannel subcarrier multiplexing (MSCM) technique to transmit the control channel and the payload data on the same wavelength and an ultra-fast clock recovery technique to synchronize the received control packets in every slot. We have experimentally shown that CORD incurs an MSCM penalty of 2.2 dB. In addition, we have demonstrated that the clock recovery scheme performs clock acquisition within 4 preamble bits with a penalty of 1 dB