
The switching fabric configuration in Figure 16.21 with W wavelength chan-
nels, K fiber ports, and F loopback fibers is capable of achieving switching and
contention resolution in wavelength, time, and space domains, by only tuning the
wavelengths in the T_WCs. Unlike other switching fabric architectures which
require O(N
2
)orO(N log N), it require s only N number of elements to control to
achieve N N switching. Scalability beyond N N using a N N AWGR can be
achieved if each input port on AWGR can accommodate N number of T_WCs so
long as each of them gives a distinct output wavelength. Therefore, a N N
AWGR can support a switching fabric of N
2