Optical switching nodes: architectures and performance

We propose and describe four optical buffer-less switching node architectures studied in the European Network of Excellence e-Photon/ONe. We consider two possible switching scenarios: data at inputs may require either an output fiber (fiber to fiber switching) or an output fiber and a specific wavelength (wavelength to wavelength switching). We first describe the four architectures; then, we propose both heuristic and optimal algorithms to solve contention among data at inputs, and study their loss performance. Although the modeling refers to synchronous fixed-size data units, most of the observations and results hold also when considering the proposed architectures as optical cross-connects for circuit-mode operations.