High Bandwidth Optical Switching Technology for Optical Fiber Communication

While fiber optic technology has the intrinsic high bandwidth for the backbone transmission required of a high speed communications network, the creation of the high bandwidth network to users remains a challenge. The main impediment thus far to the development of a high speed optical network has been the absence of the following key technologies 1 a high speed optical memory, 2 optical header recognition, 3 high speed switching commensurate with the high data capacity of an optical fiber, and 4 integration and expansion of the above functions by wavelength division multiplexing WDM and code division multiple access CDMA. No technologies that have all four of these critical elements are currently available. SRI is developing a high speed fiber optic communication network based on asynchronous transfer mode ATM. The proposed system combines optics, electronics, and software. These techniques will allow us to route, distribute, and prioritize messages without ever performing optical to electrical conversions at the data bit rate. Electronic operations can be confined to the much slower.