Recent advances in optical and hybrid packet switching

Abstract

The future of Internet depends on meeting ever-increasing capacity needs while curbing the energy consumption's uncontrolled growth in data networks, especially in switching. Optics has a tremendous potential to solve these challenges, but the lack of practical optical buffers leaves optical packet switches vulnerable to contention, hindering their use even at moderate network loads. Recent developments in optical switching devices (InP- and silicon-based), hybrid packet switching (using electronic buffers in optical switches) and network architectures (where upper layers could tolerate some loss in the optical packet layer) show a possibility that optical packet switches are poised to make a comeback in practical networks.