Fiber Optic Wiki

Optical IP Switching(2)

August 14, 2011

If the shortcut however occurs at an optical level, the process becomes Optical IP Switching. The advantage of OIS comes from the fact that today packets are transmitted optically between two points but at each routing station they have to be converted into electrical signal, routed and converted back into optical to continue their travel over the optical fiber. If instead the router is able to recognise a flow, it could create a shortcut (“cut-through connection”) directly at the optical level, and all the packets belonging to the same flow could be directed to the right destination without the optical-to-electrical conversion process. This would save time, energy, memory and processing resources on the router.

XENPAK

August 14, 2011

XENPAK is a Multisource Agreement (MSA), instigated by Agilent Technologies and Agere Systems, that defines a fiber-optic or wired transceiver module which conforms to the 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) standard of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.3 working group.

Optical power meter Pulse power measurement

August 12, 2011

Optical power meters usually display time averaged power. So for pulse measurements, the signal duty cycle must be known to calculate the peak power value. However, the instantaneous peak power must be less than the maximum meter reading, or the detector may saturate, resulting in a wrong average readings. Also, at low pulse repetition rates, some meters with data or tone detection may produce improper or no readings.