Performance Analysis of Ring-Resonator Based Optical Backplane for DPSK Transmission at 10 Gb/s

In order to overcome the limits imposed by today's electronic backplane, the architectures that implement optical switching without any need of optoelectronic conversion are gaining a lot of interest. We focus on a micro-ring resonator structure based on optical backplanes for router line-card interconnection. The feasibility of the architecture is investigated by analysing the bit error rate performance for differential binary phase-shift keying transmission of non-return zero signals at 10 Gb/s. The sensitivity to different parameters such as number of line cards, switching-element round-trip losses and frequency drifting due to thermal variations is analysed by means of computer simulations.