Capacity/cost tradeoffs in optical switching fabrics for terabit packet switches

Future Internet packet switches and routers will have to overcome intrinsic limitations of current electronic switching fabrics, related to the extremely high amount and density of the information to be internally processed, and the consequent very large number of interconnections, and very high power consumption and dissipation. Motivated by this observation, we consider different architectures of optical switching fabrics, capable to interconnect the linecards of a packet switch with an overall switching capacity in the order of Tb/s, using both Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) and space diversity. The physical-layer feasibility and the cost of the considered architectures are studied and compared using realistic models taken from commercially available optoelectronic devices.