A Novel Node Architecture for All-optical Switching Networks

摘要

The explosion of Internet traffic has brought about an acute need for high-performance networks. The bandwidth available on a single fiber has increased dramatically by the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technologies. How to use the huge bandwidth flexibly and efficiently is one of the hot topics of optical networks. It is high time that the high-performance switches/routers should be designed. All-optical switching network is a networking platform with effective and agile utilization of the available optical bandwidth. Some promising optical switching networks, such as optical packet switched, optical burst switched, and optical label switched networks are proposed. The benefit of these networks compared to the existing optical WDM networks rises from the higher network utilization at sub-wavelength granularity and from the supporting of more various services. However, there are still a lot of challenges. One challenge of them is contention. Due to the fact that the viable optical random access memory is not available in the optical domain so far, there exists a real possibility that packets may contend with one another at a switching node. In this paper, a novel node architecture called packet calking switch is proposed for all-optical switching networks. The proposed architecture is accompanied by a signaling protocol for packet-based traffic handling. This proposed node architecture is introduced into a simple network and a mesh network through simulation. The simulation results show that it is suitable for prioritized packet transmission. And it is more cost-effective than the existing node architectures because it requires much smaller optical switches and wavelength conversion to achieve nearly the same packet drop performance as the node configured partial wavelength conversion.