A New Architecture for Nonblocking Optical Switching Networks

With the current technology, all-optical networks require nonblocking switch architectures for building optical cross-connects. The crossbar switch has been widely used for building an optical cross-connect due to its simple routing algorithm and short path setup time. It is known that the crossbar suffers from huge signal loss and crosstalk. The Clos network uses a crossbar as building block and reduces switch complexity, but it does not significantly reduce signal loss and crosstalk. Although the Spanke's network eliminates the crosstalk problem, it increases the number of switching elements required considerably (to 2N² - 2N). In this paper, we propose a new architecture for building nonblocking optical switching networks that has much lower signal loss and crosstalk than the crossbar without increasing switch complexity. Using this architecture we can build non-squared nonblocking networks that can be used as building block for the Clos network. The resulting Clos network will then have not only lower signal loss and crosstalk but also a lower switch complexity.