Performance of hybrid switching technique for optical networks

The optical packet switching is widely used switching technology in current optical networks for high resource utilization. However it is not suitable for larger flows or real time traffic due to random packet loss and high delay variance. On the other hand, an alternate technique, optical flow switching (OFS), is suitable for the large flows. So to transport both types of traffic effectively, a hybrid approach of switching is proposed in this paper to combine optical packet switching and optical flow switching to exploit the merits of both technologies. Performance has been evaluated in terms of Loss probability and average packet delay. Proposed hybrid technique outperforms the existing OPS in terms of network latency.