Effect of optical pulse shapes on the performance of an all-optical packet switching node using an optical correlator as a packet address detector

As the Internet traffic grows explosively, optical packet switching networks are considered to be the most promising candidate to accommodate such tremendous traffic demand. In packet-based optical networks, a header attached to each packet payload must be recognized at each node for proper routing. Since optical header processing is essential to increase the network throughput, several optical packet header processing techniques have been proposed to reduce the header processing delay. We report the effects of input optical pulse shapes and the Gaussian pulse width on the performance of an all-optical packet switching node using an optical correlator as a packet address detector for a slotted ring network