Contention resolutions in optical packet switches

Abstract

This project studies the designing and evaluates the performance of optical packet switches (OPS) with a central focus on various contention resolution schemes. In this project, we propose and evaluate several cost-effective contention resolution solutions by exploring the time, wavelength, and space dimensions of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks, respectively. Specifically, node configurations with both the shared fiber delay lines (FDLs) and the tunable wavelength converters (TWCs) are evaluated to reveal the cost-effective manner of installing and utilizing such contention resolution components. We then propose a node configuration with the fixed wavelength conversion (FWC) and show that it performs comparably to the much more expensive configuration with full-range tunable wavelength conversion (FTWC); and it outperforms the conventional limited wavelength conversion (LWC) solution as well. To explore the space dimension in multi-fiber links, we propose the multi-fiber optical packet switch (MOPS) scheme.