Fiber Fabry-Perot tunable filter for high-speed optical packet switching

Tunable optical filters are important building blocks for All-Optical systems and networks. Fast optical tuning in several microseconds is necessary to perform high-speed optical packet switching. Multi- Gigabit/sec packet-switching will provide flexibility and higher network throughput when large numbers of users communicate simultaneously. One approach to achieve fast wavelength tuning is to use high-speed piezoelectrically-driven Fiber Fabry-Perot tunable filters (FFP-TFs). The requirement for tuning in microseconds raises a whole new set of challenges, such as ringing, thermostability and mechanical inertia control. It was shown that correlation between the mechanical resonance and optical response of the filter is important for the filter`s speed and for mounting hardware and control circuitry optimization. These features together with the FFP-TF`s high capacitance (approximately 0.25-0.5 microfarad) are being folded into building a special controller to substantially improve the shape of the driving signal and the response of the filter. The resultant controller enables tuning the high-speed FFP-TF three-orders-of- magnitude faster than that possible with standard commercial FFP-TFS. The fastest switching time achieved is 2.5 microseconds. As the result, a new packet-switched media access control protocol is being designed to minimize the searching time. The filter scans only once through the entire optical region and then tunes to all the required channels one after another in a few microseconds. It can help update Rainbow-2 Broadcast-and-Select High-Speed Wavelength Division Multiplexing All-Optical network that currently has a circuit- switched protocol using standard FFP-TFS.