Cascadability of Optical Packet-Switching Nodes Based on (R)SOA Devices

We evaluate the benefits and limitations of semi-conductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) and reflective SOAs, when used as logic gates in a 10 Gbit/s per wavelength WDM packet-switched network. We compare three components with different internal structures and provide estimation of the maximum number of cascaded packet-blocker-based nodes.