Quantifying the Impact of Wavelength Conversion on the Performance of Fiber Delay Line Buffers

We present a performance model for fiber delay line (FDL) buffers having access to multiple wavelengths on an output fiber. In optical burst switching and optical packet switching, contending bursts (or packets) need to be dealt with in an effective way, and both wavelength conversion and optical buffering are viable solutions. The buffer studied here includes both solutions, with full wavelength conversion. It is situated at the output, and handles independent arrivals. We apply an analytic discrete-time queueing model to evaluate performance in terms of loss. We mainly consider the impact of burst size (fixed or varying), scheduling policy, and buffer size. Several numerical examples assess the accuracy of our approximation, and show that our approach is applicable when burst sizes are fixed, and, when a round-robin scheduling policy is adopted, also when burst sizes vary.