101-hop cascaded operation of an optical-label switching router with all-optical clock recovery and 3R regeneration

This paper experimentally demonstrates the cascaded operation of an optical-label switching router for up to 101 hops with 311 regeneration (reamplification, reshaping, and retiming). A semiconductor optical amplifier-based Mach-Zehnder interferometer wavelength converter performs the reshaping. A Fabry-Perot filter all-optically recovers the clock from the incoming packets. Synchronous modulation by a LiNbO3 modulator using the recovered clock performs the retiming. The 3R regeneration maintains good signal quality in the cascaded operation, which is important for scalable optical networking.