Performance of an Optical Packet Switch with Shared WDM Buffers and Shared Tunable Wavelength Converters under Bursty Traffic Conditions

In the paper, a novel optical packet switch is proposed, which uses shared WDM buffers (fiber delay-lines) and shared tunable wavelength converters (TWCs) as contention resolution. The shared TWCs have two kinds of functions, either as translators to translate contending wavelengths into free wavelengths in the destination output fibers, or as translators to translate contending wavelengths into available wavelengths in the shared FDLs. Based on this architecture, a low packet loss rate can be achieved without the need of deploying a large number of FDLs and TWCs. The performance of the novel architecture is extensively studied by means of simulation experiments, where bursty traffic model is assumed.