Towards a unified model for analyzing conversion complexity in optical switching networks

Abstract Wavelength converters (WCs) are used in almost all optical switch architectures to perform switching in the wavelength domain. The ability of changing the wavelength of an input signal to another wavelength can improve blocking performance, and hence, improve the overall throughput of optical switches. The variety of types and technologies used to realize WCs make it difficult to quantify and compare the complexity and cost of the various switching architectures. In this paper we show that current models for quantifying conversion complexity do not capture the essence of the conversion process, and hence, may not be suitable for various conversion technologies. Moreover, even for the same conversion technology, the models are not flexible to consider the way that converters are adopted within the architecture. Accordingly, we attempt, for the first time to our knowledge, to develop a unified model for analyzing conversion complexity. The proposed abstract model is shown to be applicable to known conversion architectures and it avoids the limitations of existing models. The usability of the model is demonstrated on various known optical switch architectures under different conversion types.