Abstract

The continuously increasing demand for large-capacity LAN’s and MAN’S has stimulated the research on advanced optical network architectures that can achieve multigigabit-per-second throughput. The existing networks usually rely on optical-to- electrical (O/E) and electrical-to-optical (E/O) conversions at each node that prevent us from taking full advantage of the multigigabit bandwidths provided by optical-fiber and semiconductor optoelectronics.Overcoming this bottleneck requires that the optical connectivity through the network be increased. Such applications would therefore benefit from node architectures that would preserve the transparency and could also perform optical signal processing at high bit rates (1, 2.4, … Gbit/s) for several purposes (e.g., detection, modulation, and routing).

© 1993 Optical Society of America