A Comparison and Performance of Different Optical Switching Architectures

Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and transmission networks based on Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) have been increasingly deployed in the Internet infrastructure over the last decade in order to meet the huge increasing demand for bandwidth. Several different technologies have been developed for optical packet switching such as space switches, broadcast-and-select, input buffered switches and output buffered switches. These architectures vary based on several parameters such as the way of optical buffering, the placement of optical buffers, the way of solving the external blocking inherited from switching technologies in general and the components used to implement the WDM. This study surveys most of the exiting optical packet switching architectures. A simulation-based comparison of input buffered and output buffered architectures is presented. The performance analysis of the selected two architectures is derived using simulation program and compared at different scenarios. We found that the output buffered architectures give better performance than input buffered architectures. The simulation results show that the-broadcast-and-select architecture is attractive in terms that it has lees number of components compared to other switches.