Advances toward Optical Subwavelength Switching

The current optical switching/routing solutions (e.g., optical cross-connects) only support the granularity at the wavelength level unless electronic grooming switch fabrics are used. However, a future-proof network not only needs high-capacity circuit switching, but also needs high performance switching with finer granularities. Therefore, this chapter focuses on various sub-wavelength switching techniques, such as optical packet switching, photonic slot routing, and optical burst switching.