An Overview on New Technologies in Access Node Design for Ultra Fast Photonic Networks Employing Otdm

In this paper, photonic technologies for the realization of high-capacity optical time-division multiplexed (OTDM) local and metropolitan area networks (LANs and MANs) are addressed including all-optical techniques such as ultra short pulse generation, all-optical clock recovery, optical multiplexing/demultiplexing, and optical packet compression/decompression. Furthermore, the new trends in high-speed electronics, data processing and optical interconnects are analyzed enabling the avoidance of the electronic processing bottleneck. By the use of both, highspeed electronics for implementing functions of higher complexity with higher level of parallelism and all-optical techniques for the realization of simple ultra fast (> 40 Gbit/s) medium access functions, a hybrid medium access node capable of handling high data rates can be designed.