Novel Design Modification Proposal for All-Optical Fiber Loop Buffer Switch

Current optical switching technologies allow us to rapidly deliver the enormous bandwidth of wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) networks. Broad acceptance of fiber optic and photonic technology in transmission systems has led to potential opportunities for using all-optical switching to utilise high bandwidth of the fiber and to cater the ever increasing demand of higher bandwidths. The major advantage has been all-optical data transmission without any electronic processing of the data in path. A number of configurations and classifications of optical packet switches have been found in literature, , depending on the buffer position and switch architecture. The switching and routing in these designs have been in optical domain however the control in electronic domain to capitalise the enormous optical bandwidth, functionality and processing power of electronic control. This paper gives an overview of a photonic packet switch, its operation, some application limitations in the existing design of loop-buffer, single stage, feed back delay, switch architecture and proposes modifications for them. The issues aimed in the modifications include the number cell periods required for read/write operation on a particular wavelength, complexity of control unit and dynamic re-allocation of packet wavelength.