A critical review of optical switches

Abstract Optical packet switching has gained lot of popularity in last a few years due to its advantages like, large speed, more bandwidth and very less crosstalk. But due to immature optical fabrication and designing technology OPS is still beyond reality. However, many of the optical components are commercialized and some of them are still in laboratory. Thus, for optical switches which are considered as future generation routers, many switch architectures are proposed by using different sets of optical components. This paper presents a detailed review of notable switch designs in past 20 years, and also presents a comprehensive literature survey of the notable papers related to optical packet switch designs.