Scalable Non-Blocking Wavelength Router Architecture in the All-Optical Domain

Advanced airframes are expected to serve in multirole missions; mission-specific nodes must be incorporated in a scalable manner without performance penalty to existing services. Such systems are expected to operate with a mix of digital and analog signaling, with certain nodes likely requiring phase-coherent channel exchange. We propose a scalable all-optical router architecture using a waveband topology, wherein multiple wavelengths comprising a waveband are converted and manipulated to perform the routing functions. By dedicating the master bus to waveband-only transport, wavelength management is relegated to a local subnetwork, and nodal scalability is guaranteed without affecting the transport backbone. In order to meet these waveband-conversion requirements, we introduce a new class of wavelength converters possessing high conversion efficiency, unrestricted bandwidths, and transparency to analog/digital and amplitude/phase coding. In this program, we will perform in-depth computational modeling of the waveband convertors with particular emphasis on band scaling. The scalable waveband LAN will be modeled, and system performance will be quantified using specifications from CoTS devices. Successful completion of this program will result in calculation of the performance limitations of the proposed design, derivation of the engineering rules governing practical all-optical router operation, and a baseline design for a Phase II program.