SELF-ROUTING SWITCH NODE COMBINING ELECTRONIC AND PHOTONIC SWITCHING

摘要

A SELF-ROUTING SWITCH NODE COMBINING ELECTRONIC AND PHOTONIC SWITCHING A switch node for the communication of circuit switched and packet information via parallel electrical and photonic connections within the node between input links and output links. The links each have electrical and optical sublinks. A node is responsive to an address received via the electrical sublink of an input link to establish both an electrical and photonic connection for the subsequent communication of both electrical and photonic data to an output link designated by the address. The switch node selects the designated output link from a set of similarly address designated output links all of which are equally capable of establishing the path. Based on this type of selection within the node, a switching network with a plurality of stages using the nodes has multipaths between any given input port to any output port.