Tandem architecture for photonic packet switches

A new switch architecture is presented to enhance output queuing in photonic packet switches. Its application is for a packet switching environment based on the optical transport of fixed length packets. This architecture consists of a couple of cascading switching elements with output queuing, whose buffer capacity is limited by photonic technology. The introduction of a suitable buffer management allows a very good and balanced exploitation of the available optical memories, realized with fiber delay lines. In particular, packet loss performance is here evaluated showing the improvement with respect to the single switch and a way to design large optical switches is shown in order to meet broadband network requirements.