All-optical packet address and payload separation

An all-optical address and data separation scheme is presented for short 10-Gb/s packets. The technique uses a novel packet clock recovery circuit that consists of a Fabry-Perot filter and a ultrafast nonlinear interferometer (UNI) gate to generate a local packet clock. A second cascaded UNI gate is used to separate the header and the payload, performing a simple AND operation between the packet and its self-derived clock. The proposed technique requires a small number of bits as guard band and this number is independent of the line rate.