Improvements on performance of photonic packet switching nodes by priority assignment and buffer sharing

Photonic packet switching faces a major challenge in providing low packet loss probability under the constraint of shallow optical buffers depth. Although improvements have been found by exploiting the wavelength domain through the use of WDM and wavelength conversion, performance enhancement by assigning priority to packets have yet to be investigated. This paper describes analytical models for the performance of photonic switching nodes under uncorrelated traffic dealing with packets having two different priorities. Nodes with and without optical buffers are considered. Buffer sharing among packets with different priorities backed by an early-discard mechanism is studied. Simple management methodologies are proposed for optimizing resources usage