The New Banyan-Based Switching Fabric Architecture Composed of Asymmetrical Optical Switching Elements

In this paper, we propose the new architecture of the optical switching fabric which is based on the baseline switching network. Traditional baseline switching networks are composed of 2 ? 2 (or d ? d) switches. The new architecture considered in this paper is constructed from 2 ? 2, 3 ? 3, 2 ? 3 and 3 ? 2 switching elements. We show, that the proposed architecture requires less crosspoints than the traditional baseline architecture. We assumed an optical application, where semiconductor optical amplifiers are used as the optical switching elements. The proposed structure requires less number of active elements as well as passive optical splitters and combiners than the traditional baseline switching fabric. It also contains one stage fewer than the banyan network (therefore we called it the log₂ N - 1 switching fabric), which results in lower signal losses, distortions, and crosstalk.