Maturity of photonic technology makes it possible to construct all optical network switch to avoid optical-to-electrical signal conversion for routing. To realize all optical packet switching, our current network topology and routing algorithms have to be reexamined and modified to satisfy the necessities of all optical network switching such as a fast routing decision, consideration of hardware implementation, buffering etc. In this paper, first, we will review various switching architectures including crossbar, Benes and Batcher/Banyan. Secondly, optical implementation of a multiple output port network switch will be presented. In many levels of networking from multiprocessor interconnection to wide area networking, multiple latencies resulting from this scheme could improve the overall performance when combined with smart routing schemes. Finally, we present a interpretation of multistage network using a symmetric group. A Cayley graph for a symmetric group and its coset graphs suggest an interesting alternative way to construct a new multistage interconnection network.
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