We constructed a rack-mounted prototype photonic ATM switch based on the FRONTIERNET architecture. The advantages of the architecture are that its output-buffering scheme overcomes the bottlenecks that can occur when receiving and storing concurrent high-speed cells, and that there is no need to deal with contention resolution between input highways. The prototype has 16 input/output ports and 2.5 Gb/s transmission speed. Actually, six input ports and one output port are mounted in two racks. We demonstrated successful cell routing and buffering, and its stable operation, with 24-h bit-error-free switching operation. We also discussed problems to be solved in increasing the throughput of FRONTIERNET.

This paper describes large-capacity photonic ATM switching systems being developed that use FDM (or WDM) techniques. Our system is based on a simple star architecture with a modular structure. We show that it is possible to obtain a 320-Gb/s system that has enough S/N margin and can tolerate the polarization and frequency dependencies of optical devices. Our experiments using rack-mounted prototype modules to demonstrate the feasibility of our system, as well as successful 10-Gb/s 4/spl times/4 broadcast-and-select and 2.5-Gb/s 16/spl times/16 frequency-routing switch operations.

In this paper, service integration of voice, data and facsimile communications is studied from the viewpoint of developing the data switching networks to integrated services networks which could handle various types of information transmission.