Performance Analysis of Optical Packet Switches equipped with Multicast Wavelength Converters

This paper analyses the performance of an Optical Packet Switch equipped with multicast wavelength converters shared among the arriving packets. The architecture performance is evaluated by means of an analytical model and it is compared to the one of an Optical Packet Switch equipped with unicast wavelength converters. The obtained results show that in a multicast traffic scenario the proposed architecture allows the Wavelength Converters to be saved. In some cases the gain can be in the order of 95%.