This is due to the rich anisotropy evidenced by a highly-textured dispersion surface, and its dependence on the permittivity profile of the structure. Keen interest has been shown in exploiting the transport properties of nonlinear photonic crystals for modulation, switching and routing applications at telecommunication frequencies. This phase-dependence is due to linear interference in the case of co-polarized beams and due to four-wave mixing for orthogonally polarized beams. The outcome of the coherent interaction depends on the power of the wide beam and the relative phase between the two beams. We confirmed that the wide beam is able to drag the soliton over multiple waveguides towards itself while the soliton is able to maintain its original, highly confined shape. A discrete soliton, almost completely confined to a single waveguide, was excited and the interaction with a wide beam of the same or orthogonal polarization was studied. We present our results on the experimental investigation of this kind of beam interactions in a one-dimensional AlGaAs array at a wavelength of 1550 nm. The interaction between a highly localized discrete soliton and a non-diffracting beam has potential applications for all optical routing and switching. Among them are the possibilities to form highly localized discrete solitons and the ability of a wide beam to propagate without diffraction and modulational instability across the array. Discrete nonlinear optical systems exhibit unique properties unknown from wave propagation in bulk materials.