Colorless reflective packet add drop multiplexer architecture based on modulation format agnostic and low cost optical gate

We propose a novel cost efficient node architecture for WDM packet switched network based on Reflective Semiconductor Optical Amplifier. Bit rate agnostic and multi-format reflective fast optical packet selector is presented. Sub-wavelength granularity switching and low energy consumption are demonstrated. Introduction The evolution of new internet services is likely to create a bursty and distributed traffic in the metro network. Bandwidth on demand requires further flexibility as content delivery networks are moving closer to the metro segment. The benefit of optical packet technology has been demonstrated allowing high network efficiency based on sub-wavelength granularity [1]. Packet optical add/drop multiplexer (POADM) based WDM ring architectures promise to take a key role in the evolution of packet-switched networks. Electronic processing is used to aggregate the incoming traffic for the line cards. Optical transparency reduces the electronic processing when optical packets can directly transit to another POADM node allowing energy saving compared to Reconfigurable Optical AddDrop Multiplexer (ROADM) ring networks [2]. Different approaches have been proposed focusing on high efficiency systems with online fast optical packet selector (FOPS) where the added traffic can be inserted at any wavelength [1] or on low cost solution where a fixed laser is used with FOPS before the receiver [3]. In this paper, we propose a Reflective-FOPS (RFOPS) which can be used in both configurations while keeping the cost down.