All-optical variable buffering strategies and switch fabric architectures for future all-optical data routers

Future compact and power-efficient all-optical data routers can benefit from versatile all-optical buffering strategies and switch fabric architectures to achieve high performance. This paper reports two novel variable all-optical-buffer-based optical packet switching (OPS) fabric architectures and corresponding all-optical contention resolution schemes designed towards this goal. The combined input-queued-and-output-queued OPS (CIOQ-OPS) architecture incorporating enhanced K-stage output buffer units achieves lowest packet rates with an optimized input and output buffer capacity partition ratio of 0.5, while the multiple-input-queued OPS (MIQ-OPS) architecture achieves the best performance when each input parallel all-optical buffer contains two variable all-optical buffer queues. Simulation results demonstrate that the newly proposed OPS architectures achieve much lower packet loss rates, packet buffering delay, and jitter for a relatively high traffic load level of 0.7. The performance improvement is typically by one or two orders of magnitude compared to the previously reported OPS architectures with all-optical variable delay buffers with a given reasonable all-optical buffer size of 1000 B.