Experimental Demonstration of Multicast in an Optical-label Switching Router with Mixed Data Rates of 10 Gb/s and 2.5 Gb/s

Introduction The optical-label switching (OLS) technology supports transparent all-optical routing and sophisticated network functions by processing the short label in the electronic domain while leaving the data payload in the all-optical domain [1]. In this way, the routing is independent of the payload data format and bit rate. Moreover, with the help of electronic circuit, the router can support various network functions such as timeto-live and multicast. Growing multimedia conferencing and streaming applications demand optical-layer multicast that has been proposed and demonstrated in various architectures such as broadcast-and-select and one-to-many (multi-) wavelength conversion [2-3]. However, these architectures suffer from scalability problems. We proposed and demonstrated a scalable, multicastcapable optical-label switching router using crossgain modulation (XGM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) as the multi-wavelength conversion (MWC) method [4]. This method had a bit rate of 2.5 Gb/s. In this paper, we demonstrate the OLS router capable of mixed data-rate multicast and unicast routing at 10 Gb/s and 2.5 Gb/s data rates with alloptical contention resolution in the wavelength domain [5].