Optical Router Control Architecture and Contention Resolution Algorithms Capable of Asynchronous, Variable-Length Packet Switching

This paper presents a new optical-label switching (OLS) router control plane controller for multihop asynchronous, variable-length packet switching incorporating fast, fair, and wavelength-aware arbitration. The proposed optical router controller implements efficient unicast/multicast packet contention resolution algorithms and channel scheduling schemes to resolve the data plane switch fabric contention. The paper evaluates the performance of proposed algorithms in a multihop OLS simulation network with self-similar traffic input under various traffic scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms effectively improve the multihop OLS network performance. The hardware-efficient design and implementation of the proposed router controller and major modules are evaluated in terms of the area and delay for various switch sizes on a Xilinx XCV1000E field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. Finally, this paper experimentally demonstrates the combined unicast and multicast video streaming enabled by the proposed OLS router control techniques over a label switching testbed with edge routers and realistic Ethernet/IP traffic input.