Abstract
Recently, there has been an increased awareness of the impact queueing plays in the performance and design of high-performance packet switches. For instance, the importance of memory sharing and trunking is generally accepted by researchers and developers today, especially when one considers "real" traffic that is "bursty." Burstiness can result from the sources themselves, and can be exacerbated by store-and-forward networks. In this paper, we address some new features and characteristics of queueing in optical packet switches. All of the fundamental results (e.g., the performance advantages of output queueing and the memory reduction of buffer sharing) still apply to optical packet switches. However, the limited state of optical technology (e.g., the lack of an optical random access memory) puts constraints on the architecture of optical packet switches. The lack of an optical random access memory led many in the past to propose hybrid switch architectures that exploit the advantages of both optics and electronics, using electronics for the queueing of packets. Here, we instead focus our attention on the fundamental performance limitations associated with "all-optical" packet switches, in which the packet buffering is implemented via fiber delay lines.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 192-203 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering |
Volume | 1787 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 17 Dec 1992 |
Event | Multigigabit Fiber Communications 1992 - Boston, United States Duration: 8 Sep 1992 → 11 Sep 1992 |