WDM Fiber Delay Lines and AWG Based Optical Packet Switch Architecture

In this paper authors discuss an optical packet switch (OPS) architecture which utilizes the components like optical reflectors, tunable wavelength converters (TWCs), arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) and pieces of fiber to realize the switching action. In this architecture AWG is used for routing purpose and symmetric nature of AWG simplify the switch operation effectively. It is also shown that using multiwavelengths optical reflector, length of delay lines can be reduced to half of its original value. This diminution in length is useful for large size packets as for them length can grew up to more than few kilometers.