On all-optical slot switching with partial alignment

Most all-optical cell (or, fixed-length) switching schemes require incoming cells to be exactly aligned to slot boundaries through the use of optical aligners. However, such form of exact alignment is impractical in an all-optical environment as the optical aligners may require an infinite number of aligning stages to perfectly align the uncoordinated arriving cells. We show that partial alignment is a more practical solution. In partial alignment, a limited number of aligning stages is employed in each optical partial aligner. Coupling with the reduced cell size (which is smaller than the slot size), we are able to achieve performance close to that of perfectly aligned packet switch. We then demonstrate its performance through simulation.