An all-optical header extraction scheme based on the reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) is presented, which can be used to process variable-length and bit-rate transparent packets. Through selecting the appropriate carrierlifetime of the RSOA, the payload pulses obtain smaller gains than header pulses and are considered to be compressed. By using the reflective structure, the header pulses can acquire larger gains than the payload twice, and the contrast radio (CR) is improved. The simulation results show that the CRs can reach 22.8 dB and 18 dB for the packets with header pulses at the rates of 2.5 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s, respectively, and these values can be optimized through properly selecting the structure parameters, such as the small-signal gain and saturation energy.
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