The role of Arrayed Waveguide Gratings in energy-efficient optical switching architectures

The power consumption of large IP routers is increasing too fast with the increase of Internet traffic. This power consumption can be reduced if Optical Switching Fabrics (OSFs) are used instead of electronic backplanes and interconnects. And Arrayed Waveguide Gratings (AWGs) exhibit interesting properties for the design and implementation of OSFs. The paper studies how OSFs based upon AWGs scale in terms of aggregate switching capacity and power consumption.