Performance analysis of optical packet switches equipped with multicast wavelength converters

We analyze the performance of an optical packet switch equipped with shared multicast wavelength converters. The architecture performance is evaluated by means of an analytical model, and it is compared to the performance of an optical packet switch equipped with shared unicast wavelength converters. The obtained results show that in a multicast traffic scenario the proposed architecture allows the wavelength converters to be saved. In some cases the gain can be of the order of 94%.