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Abstract
Over the past decade or so, many bandwidth intensive applications have evolved and the demand for telecommunications as well as computational power has increased dramatically. Consequently, optical communication, and in particular Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology, has become a versatile transmission medium for many applications.
The introduction of WDM technology has resulted in increasing the dimensionality of switching by addition of the wavelength switching domain. A main challenge in designing WDM optical switching networks is to provide a nonblocking space wavelength switching capability with optimum hardware and switching complexity. In this dissertation, we address this challenge, and accordingly investigate the problem of designing nonblocking WDM optical switching networks with reduced hardware complexity.
We propagate a new design philosophy that exploits the unique capability of optical technologies to reduce switching complexity and enhance scalability, and show that such a design philosophy enables novel classes of WDM switching networks with many interesting and useful features.
We introduce a novel concept of Wavelength-Exchanging WDM switching networks that are capable of switching signals simultaneously and seamlessly both in space and wavelength domains. This concept leads to switching networks that have the following advantages: (1) reduced size and complexity, (2) a shorter signal path, (3) strict wavelength conversion between two predefined and fixed wavelengths, and (4) transparency to routing algorithms.
We introduce a new design approach for multicast WDM switching networks based on concentrators and multi-wavelength converters (MWCs) technologies to enhance the design flexibility of nonblocking multicast switching networks. For example, we show that it is possible to design a nonblocking WDM switching network with full-multicast capability without using "any" power splitters.
