Patent ID: 7421202

Claim:
A photonic label switching architecture, which uses an optical code division multiplexing technique to produce photonic labels required by transmitting optical packets, the architecture comprising: a photonic label extractor having an input terminal, a first output terminal and a second output terminal, to separate a first optical input signal from the input terminal into a first photonic label output to the first output terminal and a payload output to the second output terminal; a photonic label processing and swapping device having a plurality of optical time gate controllers and a plurality of optical swappers for generating new optical code labels without any control signal and connected to the first output terminal of the photonic label extractor, to produce a plurality of parallel duplicates of the first photonic label and match the duplicates to extract an auto-correlation signal and send the auto-correlation signal into one of the optical time gate controllers to generate an ultra-short pulse signal to one of the optical swappers and thus open a photonic label swapping path to produce a second photonic label different with the first photonic label; an optical switch connected to the second output terminal of the photonic label extractor and the photonic label processing and swapping device, to couple the second photonic label and the payload as a second optical input signal to be output by a connected output port; and an optical transmitter to produce the first optical input signal having the first photonic label and the payload, wherein the optical transmitter comprises: a laser diode providing a laser light which is a continuous wave; an optical splitter connected to the laser diode, to split the laser light emitted by the laser diode into a TE-mode signal and a TM-mode signal; a first polarization controller connected to the first optical path, to polarize the TE-mode signal; a first optical modulator connected to the first polarization controller, to modulate the TE-mode signal into an ultra-short optical pulse using ultra-short electrical pulse signal modulation; an optical encoder connected to the first optical modulator, to encode the ultra-short optical pulse into an optical-coded signal using optical code division multiplexing, thereby producing the first photonic label; a second polarization controller connected to the second optical path, to polarize the TM-mode signal; a tunable delay device connected to the second polarization controller, to delay the TM-mode signal as desired; a second optical modulator connected to the tunable delay device, to combine an external input packet data and the delayed TM-mode signal as the payload; and an optical coupler connected to the second optical modulator and the optical encoder, to couple the payload and the first photonic label as the first optical input signal.