WDM Optical Packet Switches with Bufferless and Partially Shared Buffering Wavelength Converters

Abstract-In this paper we introduce two architectures for optical packet switches. One is a bufferless switch employing shared Tunable Wavelength Converters (TWCs), and the other is a packet switch with Partially Shared Buffering (PSB). They were proposed for solving problems of contention resolution. The bufferless optical packet switch employing shared TWCs allows a saving in terms of employed number of converters under constraints of prefixed packet loss probability. The optical packet switch with PSB, in addition to dedicating an individual prime buffer for each output, incorporates a separate buffer for all the outputs to share. A lower packet loss probability can be achieved without the need of either dramatically increasing the size of each prime output buffer or deploying a large number of wavelength converters.