Experimental Demonstration of an Elastic Packet Routing Node Based on OCDMA Label Coding

We propose and demonstrate experimentally an all-optical packet routing scheme using hybrid-wavelength-division multiplexing/optical-code-division multiple access labeling for 40-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) data. With no electronic control, the system forwards asynchronously packets delimited by valid label and suppresses unwanted traffic. It consists of an optical flip-flop controlled by two correlators combined with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer that selects packets for each fiber output. The experimental results show optical switching operation for the optical-code gate with an extinction ratio of 16 dB between the switched and unswitched packets and a switching time below 2 ns. Error-free operation has been successfully achieved with low-power penalty for 40-Gb/s NRZ data.