Investigation of high-speed wavelength routing and bit-error-rate performance of an optical packet switch with an optical digital-to-analog conversion-based header processor

Wavelength routing and bit-error-rate (BER) performance of an optical packet switch called a wavelength label switch consisting of an optical digital-to-analog conversion-based header processor, wavelength selection portion with an electrically tunable laser, a wavelength converter based on a semiconductor optical amplifier, and wavelength routing by use of an arrayed waveguide grating was realized. Wavelength selection for an electrically tunable laser was successfully achieved within a few tens of nanoseconds by using 2-b optical header processor and a field programmable gate array-based wavelength table. High-speed transfer performance of less than a few tens of nanoseconds and BER of less than 10^-10 were verified in wavelength routing operation between three assigned wavelength.