A Hybrid Optical Switch Architecture with Shared Electronic Buffers

In this paper we present a hybrid opto-electronic switch architecture, which can be enhance the performance of optical packet switching (OPS) schemes. The proposed architecture is based on the use of electronic line-cards and packet cross-connect to a limited degree utilizing the large buffering capacity available only by means of electronic subsystems. This hybrid architecture achieves efficient utilization of optical network resources, which can be assigned dynamically in small time scales, limiting loss probability with controlled average latency.