Sharing resources for contention resolution in optical packet switching

Abstract

Packet contention is an important problem in optical packet switching system. The contention resolution techniques greatly influence the design of optical packet switch. There are several techniques for contention resolution and their mechanisms are illustrated in this paper. In order to reduce the hardware volume and cost of fiber delay lines and tunable optical wavelength converters in optical packet switch, sharing use of optical component becomes an efficient candidature. A new optical packet switch model with sharing resources has been proposed and its performance is evaluated by simulation. It is shown that by sharing use of wavelength converters and fiber delay lines, the number of optical components is greatly reduced and the performance with respect to packet loss probability is acceptable.