Architecture, performance and cost analysis of an optical packet switch with input concentrators

In this paper, we propose a novel nonblocking optical packet switch (OPS) architecture, named Input-Concentrator OPS (IC-OPS). In IC-OPS multiple input concentrators are used to aggregate all the incoming traffic into a single arrayed waveguide grating router. Accordingly, the physical size, the number of the needed wavelength converters, and the economic cost of the OPS node are decreased dramatically. Its performance is evaluated by a Markov model and compared with the well-known No-Input-Concentrator OPS structure (NIC-OPS). The closed-form expressions of the packet loss ratio and average packet delay for both architectures are given. In addition, a cost model which includes time analysis in relation to the maturity stage of the optical components has been applied. Both performance and cost comparisons show that the IC-OPS is less expensive than NIC-OPS while providing better performance.