Performances of the Data Vortex Switch Architecture Under Nonuniform and Bursty Traffic

The Data Vortex switch architecture has been proposed as a scalable low-latency interconnection fabric for optical packet switches. This self-routed hierarchical architecture employs synchronous timing and distributed traffic-control signaling to eliminate optical buffering and to reduce the required routing logic, greatly facilitating a photonic implementation. In previous work, we have shown the efficient scalability of the architecture under uniform and random traffic conditions while maintaining high throughput and low-latency performance. This paper reports on the performance of the Data Vortex architecture under nonuniform and bursty traffic conditions. The results show that the switch architecture performs well under modest nonuniform traffic, but an excessive degree of nonuniformity will severely limit the scalability. As long as a modest degree of asymmetry between the number of input and output ports is provided, the Data Vortex switch is shown to handle very bursty traffic with little performance degradation.