A photonic label switching architecture. The architecture includes a photonic label extractor to split an externally input first optical packet data into a photonic label and a payload. Then, the photonic label is input to a photonic label processing and swapping device to duplicate as a plurality of parallel copies for decoding and producing an auto-correlation output. According to the auto-correlation output, a photonic label swapping path is chosen, a new photonic label is produced, and an output port of an optical switch is chosen. A new optical packet data which is the result of the new photonic label adjoining the payload is output to the chosen output port of the optical switch.