Design and analysis of opticalpacket switching networks Ontwerp en analyse van optische pakketschakelende netwerken

Despite the recent economic fallback, following the explosion of the technology bubble, we still observe a steadily continuing growth of telecommunication traffic. It's no secret that the originally dominant voice traffic nowadays is dominated in volume by data traffic, especially originating from the Internet. That Internet, being characterized by packet based transport of heterogeneous information, has inspired people to introduce the idea of applying the packet based switching concept also in the underlying transport networks. This resulted in the proposition of adopting an Optical Packet Switching (OPS) network. This PhD dissertation aims at identifying the major issues and difficulties that arise in OPS networks, from a logical performance point of view. The latter means that we will not deal so much with physical/technological challenges of OPS, but rather discuss how to handle the optical packets in terms of contention resolution, routing, etc. To the field of OPS architectures we contributed with two studies. A first focused on node architectures for metro area networks (MANs). The metro environment is seen as the place where OPS may be introduced on a relatively short term. To compete with recent alternatives such as E-PONs or RPR, the cost of an OPS network should be kept low. To allow for relatively simple node architectures, various projects have proposed ring-based MANs. We compared two node architectures in terms of the amount of required resources to set up a given traffic matrix for a given set of nodes. We showed that a simple architecture without any active switching components in the transit path (followed by traffic passing through a MAN ring node) does not lead to any penalty in terms of transmitter and receiver capacity. For a more distant future, we addressed the question how to scale OPS switching nodes for a meshed backbone network. Our original contribution showed how a Clos-like approach, with two switching stages and a wavelength conversion stage, allows significant reduction of the number of components in a SOA-based broadcast-and-select switching matrix. Next, we move on to the problem of scheduling packets in such an OPS switch. We considered a generic architecture with a shared feedback buffer, comprising fibre delay lines (FDLs). In this packet switch we assume contention will be resolved using wavelength conversion and recirculation through the FDL buffer. For the case of fixed length packets and a slotted operation of the switch, we introduced a new Balance algorithm which leads …