Optical Routing in Packet Switched Networks

Altınkaya and Şevket Gümüştekin for serving on my thesis committee. Their advice and comments are greatly appreciated. I would like to thank my colleagues for supplying me various documents and my wife Berna, being always by my side. Finally, I would like to dedicate this thesis to the memory of my father to whom I learnt patience. iv ABSTRACT Ever-increasing demand for high capacities brought by Internet usage forces designing faster transport networks for carrying information packets. In the last ten years much attention has been focused on transporting packets directly over the optical transport networks. Researches in this area range from simple electronic and optical switching/routing methods to hybrid and more complicated all-optical packet switching systems. However, major bottleneck in all these methods is designing fast, reliable and inexpensive optical routing/switching devices. In this thesis, a method for optical routing using fiber Bragg gratings is proposed. In this method, electronic interface is used only for routing information (routing table) update cycle while packet header extraction and switching is done in optical domain. Routing is performed optically by controlling the refractive index change in fiber gratings. Four bits of header (label) information is used for routing packets to three different output routes. The network is simulated and its performance is evaluated by special software of Virtual Photonics.