High-speed All- Optical Time Division Multiplexed Node

In future high-speed self-routing photonic networks based on all-optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) it is highly desirable to carry out packet switching, clock recovery and demultplexing in the optical domain in order to avoid the bottleneck due to the optoelectronics conversion. In this paper we propose a self-routing OTDM node structure composed of an all-optical router and demultiplexers based on the symmetric Mach-Zehnder (SMZ) and chained symmetric Mach-Zehder (CSMZ) for high bit rate OTDM demultiplexing, respectively. The paper investigates both numerically and by means of simulation the noise and crosstalk characteristics of the both single channel and multiple channel demultiplexers and the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed OTDM node. For BER of 10-9 and the total bit rates of 100 and 200 Gbps the power penalty incurred are about 2 and 2.5 dB, respectively compared with 2.5 Gbps back-to-back (B-B) system.