Scalability of optical interconnections based on the Arrayed Waveguide Grating in high capacity routers

Future interconnection subsystems for switches and routers must overcome physical limitations of current electronic backplanes in order to achieve aggregate bandwidth much greater than today. Driven by this consideration we study the scalability of switching architectures implementing backplanes based on optical interconnection technology. In particular, this paper deals with the issue of interconnecting the line cards of a switch or a router exploiting wavelength agility to control signal switching by means of an architecture based on the Arrayed Waveguide Grating. In our analysis we address feasibility and scalability issues in terms of maximum number of interconnected cards, taking various design parameters into account, such as: bit rate, channel spacing and others.