An asynchronous, variable length two-stage packet switch fabric architecture with look-ahead and load-balance scheduling schemes for optical-label switching networks

This paper proposes and analyzes a two-stage optical switch architecture supporting asynchronous variable length packet switching for optical label switching network applications. The proposed scheduling algorithm combines contention resolution in wavelength, time, and space domains with the input channel look-ahead scheduling scheme and the output channel load-balance scheme. The network-wide simulation results with self-similar traffic show that the new architecture and scheduling algorithm lead to a uniform output wavelength channel utilization and effectively reduce the packet loss rate and the end-to-end jitter compared with the single-stage switch at the expense of an extra look-ahead delay.