Performance analysis of a scalable optical packet switching architecture

We carry out the analysis of a scalable switching architecture for all-optical packet switching networks. The underlying switch is based on a 2 × 2 two-stage multibuffer switched delay-line-based optical switching node. By incorporating an additional bypass line and employing a novel switch control strategy, the optical packet switching node can effectively resolve packet contentions, thus reducing the packet deflection probability substantially. In this work, we develop an exact queueing model from a discrete time Markov chain (DTMC) to evaluate the system performance under bursty, nonbursty, symmetric, and asymmetric traffic conditions. The accurate deflection probability and mean packet delay are obtained from this analytical model. Furthermore, we derive an approximate analysis to calculate the lower bound of deflection probability without the heavy computational complexities incurred by the exact analytical model. Simulation results are performed to confirm the validity of our analytic models.