Photonic Timeslot Interchangers with a Reduced Number of Feed-forward Fiber Delay Lines

Time Division Multiplexing has been employed for decades in backbone networks. However, time channels have yet to be switched in the optical domain. The conventional time-switching method is to convert a signal from the optical to electrical domains before the switching operation is performed using electronic timeslot interchangers (TSI). Many proposed photonic timeslot interchangers (PTSI) have been published, but they are yet to be commercialized. One proposed model1 claims to perform PTSI without blocking under a given component-count, but the claim was not verified or proven. This paper describes a simulation of that proposed model and verifies their claim. However, this paper proves that the originally-assumed component-count was over-estimated.