Optical Packet Switching With Photonic Crystals: An Overview

All optical packet switching arises as the last research frontier of optical networking. It is desirable because of several reasons being the most important the necessity to eliminate the bottleneck that constitutes electro-optical conversion. Having all optical packet switching networks without electro-optical conversion is the way to go to provide the astonishing amounts of bandwidth requirements needed for a future network that will link people, places and objects. So far, somehow “traditional techniques” based on per-packet wavelength routing, deflection routing, optical burst switching, etc., have been proposed without much commercial success. Aside for these approaches based on smart architectures, there are others based on novel devices like molecular electronics and photonic bandgap materials among others. Of particular interest among bandgap periodic structures, are photonic crystals. This article describes their properties and how they can be used to build a photonic packet switch.