Use of a fiber Fabry-Perot tunable filter for high-speed optical packet switching: towards an experimental prototype

Merging optical technology with fast packet switching will develop generation-after-next advanced technologies scalable to a Tbit/second. Serious challenge of such an implementation is the lack of an optical switch that would have a fast tuning speed, wide tuning range, low insertion loss, and be highly selective with a narrow passband at the same time. For this purpose we propose using a recent experimental Los Alamos National Laboratory and Micron Optics Co. break through--building an optical switch that works three orders of magnitude faster than its commercial predecessors, has a wide tuning range and low insertion loss, and is highly selective. Fast optical tuning in several microseconds is necessary to perform high-speed optical packet switching. One approach to achieve fast wavelength tuning is to use high-speed piezoelectrically- driven Fiber Fabry-Perot tunable filters. A special controller has substantially improved the shape of the driving signal and the response of the filter. The fastest switching time achieved without ringing is 3.0 microseconds. At the same time, implementation of high-speed optical packet switching rises the challenge of the bit synchronization of the packets. Conventional circuits are inadequate when a fast clock recovery for the short length packets is required because they need thousands bits to lock on. To deal with it, we propose to implement a bit clock synchronization technique for high-sped packet-switched optical network on a packet-per-packet basis. As a result, a new packet-switched media access control protocol can be designed to minimize the searching time.