Optical switch fabric design for Gigabit switching router

One of the key issues of high performance IP Gigabit Switching Router (GSR) design is about switching fabrics. In the traditional bus-based router architectures, the data transfer rate of copper backplanes will soon reach the speed limit because of connector reflections and crosstalk. An alternative optical switching fabric technology is necessary in order to satisfy the demand for high switching bandwidth. In this paper we firstly present a novel all-optical broadcasting switch fabric design scheme based on broadcasting bus architecture. In this section we also illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of architecture and demonstrate that this kind of switching fabric architecture have no interior block as well as none I/O block. Second, we discuss such implementation scheme of all-optical broadcasting switch fabric architecture as queuing, scheduling and multicasting. Finally, we get a conclusion that all-optical broadcasting switch fabric is one of the cost-effective solutions to design high-speed, scalable and simple switch fabrics compared with those complicated electric crossbar switch fabrics in GSR design.