Performance Analysis of an Optical Packet Switch Employing Full/Limited Range Share Per Node Wavelength Conversion

In this paper, we study an asynchronous optical packet switching node equipped with a number of limited range or full range wavelength converters shared per node. The packet traffic is realistically modeled by a superposition of a finite number of on-off sources as opposed to the traditional Poisson model which ignores the limited number of ports on a switch. We both study circular and non-circular limited range wavelength conversion schemes. In our simulations, we employ the far conversion policy where the optical packet is switched onto the farthest available wavelength in the tuning range, which is known to outperform the random conversion policy. We propose an approximate analytical method based on block tridiagonal Markov chains and fixed point iterations to solve for the blocking probabilities in share per node wavelength conversion systems. The method provides an accurate approximation for full range systems and acceptable results for limited range systems.