Low-crossover Extended Generalized Shuffle Network for Photonic Switching Applications

A multistage network architecture is proposed for nonblocking photonic switching exploiting waveguide interconnections and integrated 2x2 optical switching elements. The proposed architecture Low Crossover EGS is topologically equivalent to the Extended Generalized Shuffle Network, but a different novel configuration drastically reduces the number of waveguide crossovers of the interconnection stages. Some properties (number of switch elements and drivers required, number of crossovers, system attenuation and signal-to-crosstalk ratio) are derived and analyzed. The proposed EGS network is then compared with other known strictly nonblocking photonic guided-wave switching architectures, showing its scalability.