Optical buffering up to 160 Gb/s employing a quantum dot semiconductor optical amplifier-based architecture

The authors demonstrate an optical buffer architecture which is implemented using quantum dot semiconductor optical amplifiers (QD-SOAs) in order to achieve wavelength conversion with regenerative capabilities, for all optical packet switched networks. The architecture consists of cascaded programmable delay stages that minimise the number of wavelength converters required to implement the buffer. Physical layer simulations have been performed in order to reveal the potential of this scheme as well as the operating and device parameters of QD-SOA-based wavelength converters. The results obtained have indicated that, up to three time-slot interchanger (TSI) cascaded stages show good performance at 160 Gb/s in the 1550 nm communication window.