Buffering and control in an all-optical packet switching node

In this paper we study novel types of optical memories in context of their usefulness for optical buffering applications. We describe a new type of photonic packet switch with electrical shared buffering and show that the employment of a few optical buffer positions to complement the electronic ones significantly improves the switch performance. Different admission algorithms are applied in order to provide quality of service support. Furthermore, we propose two designs for the node control block.