An Optical Interconnection Architecture for Large Packet Switches

The design of switching architectures for today's telecommunication networks needs to consider the limits imposed by electronic technology; in particular, it must take into account power consumption and dissipation, as well as power supply and footprint requirements. Currently, optical technology is exploited mainly for transmission over optical links requiring large bandwidth-distance products; however, many researchers and switch architects believe that its introduction for switching functions can overcome most of the current design limits. Since many years, the research community has been studying not only solutions that make use of optics inside electronic switches but that also switching architectures that implement optical switching without any need of optoelectronic conversion. In this paper, we propose an optical switching architecture based on a WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) optical bus, aiming at interconnecting electronic line cards inside packet switches. In particular, the use of distributed packet scheduling techniques is addressed and its performance is discussed.