Design and Performance Evaluation of a Novel Optical Packet Switch Based on WDM Technologies

Abstract

In this paper, a non blocking optical packet switch based on WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) technologies with optical output buffers is proposed. Only the header of optical packets is converted to electronic signals to control the wavelength conversion array of input ports and the packet payloads can be transparently destined to their output ports. An easily implemented architecture which can provide multicast services is also presented. An optical output buffer is designed to queue the packets when more than one incoming packet should reach the same destination output port. For preserving service-packet sequencing and fairness of routing sequence, a priority scheme and a round-robin algorithm are adopted at the optical output buffer. The wavelength conversion array of input ports and the wavelength filter array of output ports are designed for routing incoming packets using WDM technology. Simulations are performed to evaluate the proposed switch architecture under uniform traffic models.