Terabit switching and security enhancement in a WDM/TDM hybrid system

Development in the WDM technologies has made multi-wavelength optical sources and components available. By combining WDM mux-demux and fast electro-optic switches, a fast configurable WDM add-drop filter can be obtained. This enables using WDM with TDM in a way that each TDM time slot is also wavelength multiplexed. Hence introducing a second dimension for switching in addition to the time dimension. This also alleviates the demanding requirement on TDM as the switching throughput increases. The number of channels that can be supported in a WDM/TDM hybrid switching system is the product of the number of time slots and the number of available wavelengths. We have done preliminary analysis on the system throughput. We will present implementation considerations of the above described systems, the give the comparison on the throughput and security sides.