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All-Optical Switching Techniques to enable high-speed , next generation photonic transport systems

In modern long-haul telecommunications systems, data propagates along fibre in optical format, but the switches that direct the data along different paths use electrical signals. This process involves an optical to electrical conversion of the data before switching occurs, followed by an electrical to optical conversion to retransmit the data over fibre. Unfortunately, due to the speed limitations of current integrated circuits, the maximum data rate that electrical switches can handle is 40Gbit/s. Thus the electrical switching process slows down the overall operation of the network, and also increases the cost of transmitting the information [1]. The next generation of high-speed telecommunications networks will require the transmitted data to be switched and routed completely in the optical domain, and thus avoid the bottleneck caused by the opto-electronic conversion process. This will enable the networks to cope with the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth, which is being driven by the rapid growth of the Internet. However, for the network to become optically transparent, new all-optical switching techniques will need to be developed. These alloptical switching techniques will allow the huge bandwidth that optical fibre can provide to be fully exploited. This paper briefly describes the current Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) [2] system and illustrates how Optical Time Division Multiplexing (OTDM) [3] can be used to increase the capacity of these systems. It also looks in details at two elements required by such an OTDM system; namely the generation of ultrashort optical pulses for data transmission and all-optical switching based on TPA.