Time-slotted scheduling for agile all-photonics networks: Performance and complexity

Schedulers in optical switches are still electronic, the performance of these units has a significant impact on the performance of the network and could form a bottleneck in high speed networks, such as AAPN. Four time-slotted scheduling algorithms are investigated in this study, PIM, iSlip, PHM and Adapted-SRA. The study addresses the performance and hardware complexity of each of the algorithms in AAPN. Performance measures were collected using an OPNET model, designed to emulate AAPN. Moreover, the hardware complexity and rate of convergence were evaluated through a hardware implementation of iSlip, and analysis for the rest of the algorithms. The study revealed the superiority of iSlip and PHM over PIM and Adapted-SRA.