Dynamically reconfigurable optical packet switch (DROPS)
Optics Express, Vol. 14, Issue 25, pp. 12008-12014 (2006)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OE.14.012008
Acrobat PDF (387 KB)
Abstract
A novel Dynamically Reconfigurable Optical Packet Switch (DROPS) that combines both spectral and spatial switching capabilities is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for the first time. Compared with an Arrayed Waveguide Grating Router (AWGR), the added spatial switching capability provided by the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) enables dynamically reconfigurable routing that is not possible with an AWGR alone. This methodology has several advantages over an AWGR including scalability, additional degrees of freedom in routing a packet from an ingress port to an egress port and more flexibility in path or line card recovery. The experimental demonstration implemented with 10-Gb/s packets shows that the added spatial switching does not degrade the bit-error-rate performance, indicating the promising potential of DROPS as a versatile and ultra-high capacity switch for optical packet-switched networks.
© 2006 Optical Society of America
1. Introduction
W. Wang, L. G. Rau, and D. J. Blumenthal, “160 Gb/s Variable Length Packet/10 Gb/s-Label All-Optical Label Switching With Wavelength Conversion and Unicast/Multicast Operation,” J. Lightwave Technol. 23, 211–218 (2005). [CrossRef]
A. Carena, M. D. Vaughn, R. Gaudino, M. Shell, and D. J. Blumenthal, “OPERA: An Optical Packet Experimental Routing Architecture with Label Swapping Capability,” J. Lightwave Technol. 16, 2135–2145 (1998). [CrossRef]
H. N. Poulsen, S. Rangarajan, M. L. Masanovic, V. Lal, and D. J. Blumenthal, “Performance of a Label Erase and Wavelength Switching Sub-System for Layer-3 All-Optical Label Switching Using a Two Stage InP Wavelength Converter,” in Technical Digest of Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC ’05), Paper OTuC2.
X. Zheng, V. Kaman, S. Yuan, Y. Xu, O. Jerphagnon, A. Keating, R. C. Anderson, H. N. Poulsen, B. Liu, J. R. Sechrist, C. Pusarla, R. Helkey, D. J. Blumenthal, and J. E. Bowers, “Three-Dimensional MEMS Photonics Cross-Connect Switch Design and Performance,” IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. 9, 571–578 (2003). [CrossRef]
J. Kim, C. J. Nuzman, B. Kumar, D. F. Lieuwn, J. S. Kraus, A. Weiss, C. P. Lichtenwalner, A. R. Papazian, R. E. Frahm, N. R. Basavanhally, D. A. Ramsey, V. A. Aksyuk, F. Pardo, M. E. Simon, V. Lifton, H. B. Chan, M. Haueis, A. Gasparyan, H. R. Shea, S. Arney, C. A. Bolle, P. R. Kolodner, R. Ryf, D. T. Neilson, and J. V. Gates, “1100×1100 Port MEMS-Based Optical Crossconnect With 4-dB Maximum Loss,” IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 15, 1537–1539 (2003). [CrossRef]
S. Kamei, M. Ishii, M. Itoh, T. Shibata, Y. Inoue, and T. Kitagawa, “64×64-channel uniform-loss and cyclic-frequency arrayed-waveguide grating router module,” Electron. Lett. 39, 83–84 (2003). [CrossRef]
- An AWGR based packet switch has a fixed mapping from ingress to egress port in which specific wavelengths in each ingress port would exit from specific egress ports based on a permutation mechanism (refer to Table 1 for an 8×8 example). In contrast, a DROPS-based switch has the potential of routing any wavelength from any ingress port to any egress port (Table 2). This is not the case in an AWGR-based mechanism (Table 1).Table 1. Ingress-egress mapping of wavelengths in an 8×8 AWGR mechanism
AWGR output port λ1 λ2 λ3 λ4 λ5 λ6 λ7 λ8 AWGR input port 1 1 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 2 2 1 8 7 6 5 4 3 3 3 2 1 8 7 6 5 4 4 4 3 2 1 8 7 6 5 5 5 4 3 2 1 8 7 6 6 6 5 4 3 2 1 8 7 7 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 8 8 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Table 2. Ingress-egress mapping of wavelengths in an 8×8 DROPS mechanism - The combination of spectral and spatial degrees of freedom in the DROPS mechanism provides far more flexibility in controlling the routing of the packet in a switch fabric as compared to only one degree of freedom (wavelength control) in an AWGR mechanism.
- The DROPS mechanism provides a higher degree of scalability compared to the AWGR mechanism for a packet switching application due to the potential scalability of the number of ingress/egress ports in MEMS, which is far greater than what is available via AWGRs.
- The dynamical reconfigurability of the DROPS mechanism would allow fast recovery in milliseconds from a line card or path failure without any need for modifying the packet wavelength, which is not the option in AWGR-based methods. This provides more flexibility in fast recovery scenarios.
- A single-stage MEMS switch is not applicable to packet switching applications due to its slow switching time (on the order of milliseconds). However, a combination of spectral and spatial switching mechanism (DROPS) would allow fast switching of packets based on their wavelengths which is done by modifying the wavelengths of each packet through a fast tunable laser (on the order of nanoseconds).
- A single-stage MEMS switch only provides switching capabilities based on the spatial property of the input packets, which in many scenarios is not enough. However, combining a MEMS switch with a spectral switch would allow the packets to be switched not only based on their ingress ports, but also their specific wavelengths per packet, which is crucial in practical packet switching / routing architectures.
- Even if a MEMS switch can be switched at high / comparable speed, the spectral switch in DROPS cannot be simply replaced with such spatial switch because in addition to providing a fast switching mechanism, the spectral switch also provides another dimension to packet switching such that the combination of the spectral and spatial switching would provide the capability of switching a packet based on both input port and the wavelength of each packet.
C. Nuzman, J. Leuthold, R. Ryf, S. Chandrasekhar, C. R. Giles, and D. T. Neilson, “Design and Implementation of Wavelength-Flexible Network Nodes,” J. Lightwave Technol. 21, 648–663 (2003). [CrossRef]
2. Experiment and results
W. Wang, L. G. Rau, and D. J. Blumenthal, “160 Gb/s Variable Length Packet/10 Gb/s-Label All-Optical Label Switching With Wavelength Conversion and Unicast/Multicast Operation,” J. Lightwave Technol. 23, 211–218 (2005). [CrossRef]
X. Zheng, V. Kaman, S. Yuan, Y. Xu, O. Jerphagnon, A. Keating, R. C. Anderson, H. N. Poulsen, B. Liu, J. R. Sechrist, C. Pusarla, R. Helkey, D. J. Blumenthal, and J. E. Bowers, “Three-Dimensional MEMS Photonics Cross-Connect Switch Design and Performance,” IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. 9, 571–578 (2003). [CrossRef]
3. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References and Links
W. Wang, L. G. Rau, and D. J. Blumenthal, “160 Gb/s Variable Length Packet/10 Gb/s-Label All-Optical Label Switching With Wavelength Conversion and Unicast/Multicast Operation,” J. Lightwave Technol. 23, 211–218 (2005). [CrossRef] | |
A. Carena, M. D. Vaughn, R. Gaudino, M. Shell, and D. J. Blumenthal, “OPERA: An Optical Packet Experimental Routing Architecture with Label Swapping Capability,” J. Lightwave Technol. 16, 2135–2145 (1998). [CrossRef] | |
H. N. Poulsen, S. Rangarajan, M. L. Masanovic, V. Lal, and D. J. Blumenthal, “Performance of a Label Erase and Wavelength Switching Sub-System for Layer-3 All-Optical Label Switching Using a Two Stage InP Wavelength Converter,” in Technical Digest of Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC ’05), Paper OTuC2. | |
X. Zheng, V. Kaman, S. Yuan, Y. Xu, O. Jerphagnon, A. Keating, R. C. Anderson, H. N. Poulsen, B. Liu, J. R. Sechrist, C. Pusarla, R. Helkey, D. J. Blumenthal, and J. E. Bowers, “Three-Dimensional MEMS Photonics Cross-Connect Switch Design and Performance,” IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. 9, 571–578 (2003). [CrossRef] | |
J. Kim, C. J. Nuzman, B. Kumar, D. F. Lieuwn, J. S. Kraus, A. Weiss, C. P. Lichtenwalner, A. R. Papazian, R. E. Frahm, N. R. Basavanhally, D. A. Ramsey, V. A. Aksyuk, F. Pardo, M. E. Simon, V. Lifton, H. B. Chan, M. Haueis, A. Gasparyan, H. R. Shea, S. Arney, C. A. Bolle, P. R. Kolodner, R. Ryf, D. T. Neilson, and J. V. Gates, “1100×1100 Port MEMS-Based Optical Crossconnect With 4-dB Maximum Loss,” IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 15, 1537–1539 (2003). [CrossRef] | |
S. Kamei, M. Ishii, M. Itoh, T. Shibata, Y. Inoue, and T. Kitagawa, “64×64-channel uniform-loss and cyclic-frequency arrayed-waveguide grating router module,” Electron. Lett. 39, 83–84 (2003). [CrossRef] | |
Personal communication with Dr. Roger Helkey of Calient Networks, Goleta, CA, USA | |
P.M. Hagelin, U. Krishnamoorthy, C. M. Arft, J. P. Heritage, and O. Solgaard, “Scalable Fiber Optic Switch Using Micromachined Mirrors,” in Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Solid-State Sensors and Actuators (Transducer ‘99), pp. 782–785 | |
C. Nuzman, J. Leuthold, R. Ryf, S. Chandrasekhar, C. R. Giles, and D. T. Neilson, “Design and Implementation of Wavelength-Flexible Network Nodes,” J. Lightwave Technol. 21, 648–663 (2003). [CrossRef] |
OCIS Codes
(060.2330) Fiber optics and optical communications : Fiber optics communications
(060.4250) Fiber optics and optical communications : Networks
ToC Category:
Fiber Optics and Optical Communications
History
Original Manuscript: May 31, 2006
Revised Manuscript: October 31, 2006
Manuscript Accepted: November 24, 2006
Published: December 11, 2006
Citation
Chi-Heng Huang, Hsu-Feng Chou, John E. Bowers, Farzam Toudeh-Fallah, and Russ Gyurek, "Dynamically reconfigurable optical packet switch (DROPS)," Opt. Express 14, 12008-12014 (2006)
http://www.opticsinfobase.org/oe/abstract.cfm?URI=oe-14-25-12008
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References
- W. Wang, L. G. Rau, and D. J. Blumenthal, "160 Gb/s Variable Length Packet/10 Gb/s-Label All-Optical Label Switching With Wavelength Conversion and Unicast/Multicast Operation," J. Lightwave Technol. 23, 211-218 (2005). [CrossRef]
- A. Carena, M. D. Vaughn, R. Gaudino, M. Shell, and D. J. Blumenthal, "OPERA: An Optical Packet Experimental Routing Architecture with Label Swapping Capability," J. Lightwave Technol. 16, 2135-2145 (1998). [CrossRef]
- H. N. Poulsen, S. Rangarajan, M. L. Masanovic, V. Lal, and D. J. Blumenthal, "Performance of a Label Erase and Wavelength Switching Sub-System for Layer-3 All-Optical Label Switching Using a Two Stage InP Wavelength Converter," in Technical Digest of Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC ’05), Paper OTuC2.
- X. Zheng, V. Kaman, S. Yuan, Y. Xu, O. Jerphagnon, A. Keating, R. C. Anderson, H. N. Poulsen, B. Liu, J. R. Sechrist, C. Pusarla, R. Helkey, D. J. Blumenthal, and J. E. Bowers, "Three-Dimensional MEMS Photonics Cross-Connect Switch Design and Performance," IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. 9, 571-578 (2003). [CrossRef]
- J. Kim, C. J. Nuzman, B. Kumar, D. F. Lieuwn, J. S. Kraus, A. Weiss, C. P. Lichtenwalner, A. R. Papazian, R. E. Frahm, N. R. Basavanhally, D. A. Ramsey, V. A. Aksyuk, F. Pardo, M. E. Simon, V. Lifton, H. B. Chan, M. Haueis, A. Gasparyan, H. R. Shea, S. Arney, C. A. Bolle, P. R. Kolodner, R. Ryf, D. T. Neilson, J. V. Gates, "1100 × 1100 Port MEMS-Based Optical Crossconnect With 4-dB Maximum Loss," IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 15, 1537-1539 (2003). [CrossRef]
- S. Kamei, M. Ishii, M. Itoh, T. Shibata, Y. Inoue, and T. Kitagawa, "64 × 64-channel uniform-loss and cyclic-frequency arrayed-waveguide grating router module," Electron. Lett. 39, 83-84 (2003). [CrossRef]
- Personal communication with Dr. Roger Helkey of Calient Networks, Goleta, CA, USA
- P.M. Hagelin, U. Krishnamoorthy, C. M. Arft, J. P. Heritage, O. Solgaard, "Scalable Fiber Optic Switch Using Micromachined Mirrors," in Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Solid-State Sensors and Actuators (Transducer ‘99), pp. 782-785
- C. Nuzman, J. Leuthold, R. Ryf, S. Chandrasekhar, C. R. Giles, and D. T. Neilson, "Design and Implementation of Wavelength-Flexible Network Nodes," J. Lightwave Technol. 21, 648-663 (2003). [CrossRef]
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