Photonic RAM a Mystery

In this 21 century, Internet plays a vital role in every ones day – to-day activities. Beginning with the invention of transistors, mans quest for faster cost effective computers and the networking equipments was always on the increase. But as the equipments reached their physical limits due to phenomena’s such as quantum mechanical tunneling, electron speed/bandwidth constrains researchers began to think in terms of all optical domain. This give birth to research topics such as quantum optical computing, Optical networking.

In packet switched networks router and switch play an important role in forwarding packets from source to the destination. All the commercial routers and switches designed and developed are now are in the electronic domain. This is because router needs a buffer for temporarily storing packets for IP Packet header processing and forwarding it to appropriate locations. For buffering electronic RAM is the only viable solution as Photonic RAM is only in its infant stage. So even if the packet transmission is through optical fiber when ever a routing decision come, it has to convert this optical signal again back to electronic domain, do the IP header processing, reassemble the packets and again convert into optical domain for transmission. This is a severe bottleneck as far as the All optical networking technologies are concerned. Although techniques such as All Optical Label Swapping (AOLS) are promising, still it has to rely on electronics for IP header processing. All the networking architectures designed and developed revolves around this bottleneck.

Techniques are developed now to realize RAM in the Optical domain itself. Techniques such as Fiber delay lines and laser neural network to implement Photonic RAM (and to avoid packet contention) proved that Optical Packet Buffering is possible. But the commercial viability of this system is still a mystery. I hope the future research works in this area will definitely answer the following questions related to Optical Packet buffering techniques.
a) What all laws of physics made the bottleneck for Photonic RAM ?.
b) What all Technologies are to be made for overcoming this bottleneck?.
c) Can we design a Photonic RAM with any other Physics concepts like Polarization , Quantum dots, liquid crystals, ferrite's etc. economically?.
d) Proposed Networking Architecture designs based on Photonic RAM. Integration of this Architecture to the IP-V6 protocol.

Tags:Optical Networking, Physics, Photonics, electronics