Evaluations on a Buffering WDM Optical Packet Switch Equipped with Shared Wavelength Converters

In this paper, a buffering WDM optical packet switch scheme employing the wavelength converters for contention resolution is evaluated. The architecture is dedicated to an individual buffer for each output and is equipped with tunable wavelength converters (TWCs) shared among the input lines. With the wavelength dimension for contention resolution, the size of each output buffer is reduced and less number of wavelength converters is employed; therefore, it is cost-effective. Based on the switch architecture, lower packet loss probability can be achieved. Furthermore, we analyze mean contention time in output contention process and mean packet delay in output buffer. Our studies indicate that the output contention process can be modeled by a B _I/D/B/N queueing process and the output buffer can be modeled by a G^[x]/D/1/B queueing process. Performance of TWCs in buffering packet switch is extensively studied by means of numerical simulations.