Demonstration of Failure Reconfiguration via Cross-Layer Enabled Optical Switching Fabrics

Growing bandwidth requirements of future Internet applications are driving the potential deployment of all-optical packet switching fabrics in next-generation routers. The switching fabric should be capable of executing a fast reconfiguration of its switching state, allowing for the dynamic management of optical packets and the seamless recovery of the fabric, in the case of IP-layer router failures and cross-layer enabled optical-layer signal degradations. We demonstrate a reconfigurable optical switching fabric architecture that uses a field-programmable gate array control plane. Based on the state of a higher-layer router, the switching fabric supports the correct routing and error-free transmission of 10 × 10-Gb/s wavelength-striped optical packets, with bit-error rates less than 10^-12 on all payload channels. A power penalty less than 1 dB is shown.