Abstract
A wavelength-to-time technique was used for recovering the routing header bits across parallel wavelengths as well as determining the existence of data packets in a WDM network. The signal was sampled by an optical gate, then a series of fiber Bragg gratings was used to give a staggered time delay to the different wavelengths. Since the optical information is recovered only over a short gated pulse time, the recovered wavelengths were spread across a longer time slot until the next gate signal arrives. In this way, only a single photodetector is used to detect control information across many wavelengths.