All-optical switching for 100-GB/S and beyond optical networks

With the drastically increasing traffic in optical backbone and metro networks, ultrahigh-capacity and cost-effective all-optical switching is anticipated. All-optical switching nodes based on 1×N wavelength selective switches (WSS´s) are widely used in current optical networks. However, the existing architecture of multi-dimensional switching node based on 1×N WSS´s is very complicated and costly. In this paper, we propose an N×N WSS architecture to tackle this problem, and address its optical design and application. Furthermore, we propose to introduce sub-wavelength-level all-optical switching technology into a network node or even the whole network, and demonstrate a petabit-scale switching node and a 100-Gb/s optical burst network, respectively.