Use of Shared Buffering and Wavelength Conversion for Contention Resolution in an Optical Packet Switch Architecture

This paper presents a combined scheme for the contention resolution in optical packet switches. The scheme leads to more efficient use of the buffer space compared to the output buffering scheme. The performance of the switch is further improved by utilizing the wavelength conversion. This can be accomplished at a limited cost as the wavelength converters are utilized in the shared buffer loop, and not in the input end. The superiority of the scheme has been established through extensive simulation and analytical study and the results are encouraging, paving the way for further research in this direction.