Scheduling in Optical Packet Rings

In the metropolitan area, traditional SONET/SDH circuit switched rings are likely to be replaced with optical packet/burst switching technologies. In this paper we consider a slotted WDM optical packet ring operating without resource reservation mechanisms. In such rings, optical packets in transit have priority over traffic to be inserted by the node. Packets to be inserted are thus queued according to their destination, in order to avoid head-of-line blocking. We focus on scheduling policies and compare several MaxWeight scheduling policies, including Oldest Packet First (OPF) which emulates FIFO queueing while avoiding head-of-line blocking. We show that there is a trade-off between implementation complexity and fairness, and identify the Largest Virtual Waiting Time First (LVWTF) scheduling policy as presenting both a low complexity and a good fairness performance.