Patent 7149426 was granted and assigned to Avanex on December, 2006 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An all optical switching system which is optically switched, from the signal channel all the way to a router. Errors in the routers are detected, and indications of those errors are sent back to the optical switch. The optical switch uses a system which picks off a piece of the signal to use the control signal to control the switching.