A General Purpose Optical Switching Concept

With the increasing deployment of optical fibers in transmission system and demand for high bandwidth services, such as video and high definition TV, high-speed switching (throughput and switching speed) on the order of Gb/s is desirable in telecommunications. Most of the optical switching techniques developed to-date are addressing space division switching, in which switching speed is not a major concern. Very few optical switching techniques using time division switching have been reported. In this paper we will describe a high-speed switching concept by using a ring-based structure. This concept can be used as a self-routed circuit or packet switching. The switch has the ability to switch different types of information (voice, data, and video) and also can be applied to baseband channel-to-channel switching. This general purpose optical switch can be used in conjunction with an optical local area network as a distributed switch or can he used as a central office switch to switch trunk lines and individual lines.