Feedback fiber delay lines and AWG based optical packet switch architecture

All-optical switching has been proposed as a candidate to allow high capacity networking in the future. However, most of the proposed all optical switching architectures have a large physical loss, and hence, their cascadabilty is limited. This paper proposes an optical packet switch (OPS) which has very low loss. The architecture is realized by using components like optical reflectors, tunable wavelength converters (TWCs), arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) and pieces of fiber. This architecture uses the routing pattern of AWG, and its symmetric nature, to simplify switch operation significantly. It is also shown that by using a multi-wavelengths optical reflector, the length of delay lines can be reduced to half of its original value. This reduction in length is useful for larger size packets as their length can grow to more than a few kilometers. The proposed architecture is compared with other approaches that have been published in literature in terms of performance, implementation complexity, number of components used and cost. This paper also proposes a cost model for the cost estimation of the TWCs. The proposed model takes into consideration fiber-to-chip coupling (FCC) and the wavelength speed-up factor (WSU).