An Analytical Study of an All-Optical Packet Switch with QoS Support

Optical Packet Switching (OPS) is a promising technology that efficiently utilizes the raw bandwidth provided by the Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technique. OPS is expected to support the radically increasing bandwidth demands of the Next Generation Internet backbone. Since realtime applications demand various but certain levels of Quality of Service (QoS), optical networks based on OPS should provide service differentiation. In this paper we investigate the performance of an all-optical packet switch, in terms of the packet blocking probability. We analyse several QoS differentiation schemes, including wavelength conversion, packet dropping and wavelength reservation. We demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed analysis by comparing the analytical results with that of simulation; the results found to be quite satisfactory.