Abstract: Optical packet switches offer high speed, fine granularity, flexibility and transparency to data rate and format. There has been much work on the design of optical packet switches each having distinct advantages and disadvantages. Nevertheless, their common limitation is optical splitting loss, which is compensated by optical amplifiers, further degrading performance because of the induced amplifier noise. Hence, it is desirable to design an optical packet switch with a low optical splitting loss. This study has focused on the ALCATEL broadcast-and-select switch, which has significant optical splitting and combining losses for large switches. Arrayed-waveguide gratings (AWG) have been chosen to reduce the switch splitting loss replacing the demultiplexers and Semiconductor Optical Amplifier gates (SOA gates) in the ALCATEL switch. The switch still has the same functionality with an AWG which can be used as an interconnect, and has been demonstrated with insignificant crosstalk of approximately 30 dB. In this paper, three optical packet switches using AWGs are studied; the broadcast-and-select switch, the feed-forward delay switch and the feed-back delay switch. An additional novel feature is their use of wavelength division multiplexed inputs and outputs. Here, their optical performance is investigated with respect to bit error rate and power penalty, and compared with the ALCATEL broadcast-and-select switch using SOA gates.!14
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