Performance analysis of a photonic single-hop ATM switch architecture, with tunable transmitters and fixed frequency receivers

We consider a photonic asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch based on the single-hop wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) architecture with tunable transmitters and fixed frequency receivers. The switch operates under a schedule that masks the transceiver tuning latency. We analyze approximately a queueing model of the switch in order to obtain the queue-length distribution and the cell-loss probability at the input and output ports. The analysis is carried out assuming two-state Markov modulated Bernoulli process (MMBP) sources that capture the notion of burstiness and correlation, two important characteristics of ATM traffic, and non-uniform destination probabilities. We present results which establish that the performance of the switch is a complex function of a number of system parameters, including the load balancing and scheduling algorithms, the number of available channels, and the buffer capacity. We also show that the behavior of the switch in terms of cell-loss probability as these parameters are varied cannot be predicted without an accurate analysis. Our work makes it possible to study the interactions among the system parameters, and to predict, explain, and fine tune the performance of the switch.