A Totally Shared Optical Packet Switch: Dimensioning, Control Algorithm and Performance

In this paper, a novel optical packet switch is proposed, which uses a set of shared fiber delay lines (FDLs) and a set of shared tunable wavelength converters (TWCs) to resolve optical packet contentions. In addition, two control algorithms, i.e., Fiber-First (FF) and Wavelength-First (WF), are proposed to schedule optical packets. Performance of the novel switch is evaluated by means of simulation experiments. Simulation results show that based on either of these two control algorithms, the switch can achieve super performance without employing a lot of FDLs and TWCs. Moreover, the performance of FF and WF is compared. Detail analyses are also given in this paper.