Photonic switching network with broadcast facility

Claim 1

Photonic switching network for routing data packets between a plurality of inputs and a plurality of outputs, characterized in that to broadcast a packet from one input to a plurality of outputs of the switching network, it comprises at least two switching stages comprising at least one switch comprising: a plurality of tunable wavelength converters at respective inputs of the switch to assign a wavelength to each packet applied to an input of the switch; optical buffers common to all the outputs of the switch for receiving packets from the tunable wavelength converters and storing each packet for a duration selectable between 0 and KT c where K is an integer and T c is the duration of each packet; a space routing stage comprising a tunable filter for each output of the switch, receiving packets from the optical buffers and passing to a given output only packets having a given wavelength; and control means for controlling said converters, said filters, and said buffers to forward a same packet several times in succession at least to one output, the number of times it is forwarded depending on the content of an internal routing label associated with said packet.