Assessment of Packet Loss for an Optical Packet Router with Recirculating Buffer

The design of an optical packet switched network to transport both data and voice, focussing on an IP client layer, is the subject of DAVID (Data And Voice Integration over DWDM), a research project funded by the European Community. The network is composed of a metropolitan part, where optical rings are connected through devices denoted as Hubs. Those Hubs also provide the connection to the backbone part of the network, made up by SOA based optical packet routers (OPRs) interconnected in a mesh. This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of the backbone network, in casu an OPR, in terms of packet loss rate (PLR): different optical buffer implementations and scheduling strategies are proposed, through simulation the resulting PLR is determined.