Optical fiber-delay-line buffer management in output-buffered photonic packet switch to support service differentiation

Abstract

We study optical fiber-delay-line buffer management schemes for supporting service differentiation with less complexity, with the objective of achieving ultra-high-speed packet forwarding in a photonic packet switch. We propose the vPBSO (Variable-length-packet-capable Partial Buffer Sharing with Overwriting) method, which is a prioritized buffer management scheme for providing DiffServ Assured Forwarding. This method can handle asynchronously arriving variable-length packets. vPBSO is based on a single queue, and its complexity is Oscr(p), where p is the number of priority classes. We show that vPBSO is effective when the arrival rate of higher priority packets is lower than that of lower priority packets, which is a likely situation in a prioritized system. vPBSO provides better performance than vPBS (an extension of partial buffer sharing) for high-priority packets, and the performance for low-priority packets is also better or at least almost the same. vPBSO provides service differentiation in the case of two or more priority classes in which the difference of packet loss probability in each class is made larger than one order of magnitude by appropriate tuning of thresholds