A large capacity photonic ATM switch for wavelength division multiplexing networks

Optical switching networks to transport vast amounts of information are important for B-ISDN services. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is emerging as the dominant technology for future optical networks. A large capacity photonic ATM switch architecture using WDM technology is proposed in this paper. The proposed switch is suitable for WDM optical ATM networks, that is, the input and an output of the switch are wavelength division multiplexed. The switch can provide very large ATM cell switching capacity, for instance, 10 Tbit/s, with reasonable complexity. The basic switch module of the proposed switch has a simple architecture, and reduces the amount of a buffer hardware by introducing the WDM concept