International Science and Technology Journal

The optical networks need to carry out all the switching and routing in optical domain to avoid the bottleneck imposed by the optoelectronic conversions. Optical switching is an essential element in the optical networks, in particular; the switches architecture.
In this paper the crossbar switch architecture is presented as proposed switch architecture based on symmetric Mach-Zehnder (SMZ) interferometer configuration as switching elements(SEs). The mathematical expressions for the output of the SMZ is demonstrated in both cases of the input port of the switch (port 1 or port 2), then the mathematical equations for the output of the proposed switch is presented in terms of output electric field and the two output equations for the output port of the proposed switch are presented one if the gain for all SMZSEs are equal and second if the gain is different.
The mathematical modules of the proposed switch are developed to investigate the output power and crosstalk (CXT) against the changes in phase and coupling coefficient parameters by using Matlab software.
The numerical result for the proposed crossbar switch shows the output power has a linear behavior with the change of the coupling coefficient and the CXT at its minimum when coupling coefficient is 0.5.
The proposed switch gave good performance in terms of switching the input data signal to the desired port with low CXT when the phase is changed. The changes in the coupling coefficient value increases the crosstalk of each switching element within the proposed switch and this result of increases in the output power at a certain values of the coupling ratio where the input signal here is power signal (always one) which mean there is always input at the input port of the switch, and this give a drawback to it the proposed switch when the input signal is slow pulse signal.