EE Postdoctoral Scientist Dr. David Hay received an IEEE GLOBECOM Best Paper Award for his paper "Crosstalk-Preventing Scheduling in AWG-Based Cell Switches" (co-authored with Andrea Bianco and Fabio Neri from Politecnico di Torino, Italy). GLOBECOM is one of the major conferences in the area of communications. Over 3,400 papers were submitted to the conference, from which about 1,200 papers were accepted. Hay's paper was selected as the best paper in GLOBECOM's Optical Networks and Systems Symposium.
The paper focuses on AWG-based optical switching fabrics. These switching fabrics are affected by coherent crosstalk, that can significantly impair system operation when the same wavelength is used simultaneously on several input ports to forward data to output ports. To permit large port counts in a N×N AWG, the scheduling of transmissions across the AWG must therefore prevent switch configurations that generate large crosstalk. The paper studies the properties and the existence conditions of switch configurations able to control coherent crosstalk. The results show that it is possible to keep an AWG-based switch with large port counts in the feasible operational region without significant performance degradation, provided that a proper scheduling algorithm is used.
Dr. Hay is working with Prof. Gil Zussman for his postdoc research at Columbia University.