On the performance of a packet switch with twin optical transmitters

A packet switch based on electrooptical technologies is presented. It is composed of N VLSI chips which interface the input and output links with the internal optical interconnection network. Its simulation, when loaded with homogeneous input and output traffic, showed that two packets at a time must be first extracted from each input buffer and then transmitted on the optical interconnection network to achieve an almost optimal performance. This significantly affects both the architecture of the VLSI chips and the optical transmission scheme