An optical packet switch design with shared electronic buffering and low bit rate add/drop inputs

An optical packet switch design using optical switching and shared electronic buffering is described and analyzed. The electronic buffering and add/drop unit allows random memory access, variable packet length, and aggregation/segregation of low bit rate streams. The design is scalable to a large number of wavelengths, and employs contention resolution by using the wavelength dimension combined with electronic buffering. The number of buffer inputs, i.e. the number of optoelectronic conversions, is minimized. The packet loss and delay performance when using fixed packet length and electronic buffering are investigated by simulation. If the link utilization is moderate, the buffering requirements becomes minimal. If number of wavelengths in the link is increased, the number of buffer inputs can be reduced. With a sufficiently high number of wavelengths, the buffer requirements is minimal, even when the link utilization is high.