Performance evaluation of the optical staggering switch

The staggering switch is an almost-all, optically implementable packet switch. Among the salient features of the switch is lack of random access optical memory and excellent packet loss/delay performance. The performance of the staggering switch-the probability of loss-is studied for uniform traffic conditions. For a small number of delay lines, a precise result is obtained. Modeling the switch as a B/D/1/m queueing system, a lower estimate for packet loss in the switch is derived. For low-load operation, asymptotic characteristics are computed that bound the performance of the switch from above and from below. Comparing with simulation results, it is shown that the lower bound is a very good approximation of the actual switch performance