OPN06-1: A WDM Optical Packet Switch based on Wavelength Converter Blocks with Heterogeneous Conversion Capability

The wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) optical packet switches (OPSes) using wavelength converters (WCs) have been focused to improve the optical network performance significantly. Among them, a shared-per-node (SPN) switch architecture has been considered as a way to utilize WCs efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new switch control algorithm for the architecture, which reduces the total number of wavelength conversion degree (WCD) of a wavelength converter block (WCB). The algorithm also reduces the number of WCs with higher WCD while minimizing the packet loss by wavelength contention at outbound links. Based on this algorithm, we then design a flexible WDM OPS architecture. The proposed algorithm, different from the previous works, focuses on using the heterogeneous wavelength converter blocks (HeWCBs), where a HeWCB consists of WCs with different WCD. The proposed HeWCBs are motivated by the observation that the conventional WDM OPS architecture seldom uses long-range convertible WCs. The architecture shows the same packet loss probability as that of the homogeneous WCBs (HoWCBs) consisting of WCs with the same WCD. Through analysis and simulation, it is shown that the WDM OPS architecture using a combination of WCs of WCD less than or equal to d achieves the same performance as using HoWCBs with WCs of WCD d.