Label Stacking in Photonic Packet-Switched Networks With Spectral Amplitude Code Labels

Label stacking is used for hierarchical addressing to reduce the size of lookup tables and to increase the speed of the routing process. We propose an optical label stacking using spectral-amplitude codes (SAC) as labels to accomplish ultrafast packet forwarding. We discuss the advantages of this label architecture compared to other proposals in the literature and present experimental results. We experimentally examine two types of optical packets, one with separable SAC labels and the other one with SAC-encoded payloads. In the first case, the SAC label is a collection of spectral tones modulated at the packet rate (low rate), and the payload is on a separate wavelength modulated at the data rate (fast rate). In the second case, the payload data modulates the collection of wavelengths that constitute the code. We implement a network with two forwarding nodes, and we transmit the packets with two labels in the label stack over 80 km of fiber and measure the bit error rate (BER) after two hops. We achieve error-free transmission (BER<10 ^-9) for the packets with SAC labels and SAC-encoded payload at payload bit rates of 10 and 2.5 Gb/s, respectively. This is the first experimental demonstration of optical label stacking to our knowledge