Contention Resolution in an Asynchronous All-Optical Packet Switch

We propose an asynchronous optical packet switching node architecture, where congestion resolution is based on shared optical buffers and tuneable wavelength converters. We evaluated our switch by simulations and show that decreasing packet loss probability obtained by optical buffers can be efficiently boosted by adding a few shared tuneable wavelength converters, which allows for reduction of all-optical buffer size. The smaller switch size the larger impact of wavelength conversion on packet loss probability was observed. Furthermore it can be noticed that for the proposed node architecture the higher number of buffer positions the larger improvement caused by applying tuneable wavelength converters can be achieved.