A Novel Photonic Switch Architecture based on Optical Codes for Optical Burst Switched Networks

This paper proposes a novel bufferless switch architecture based on optical codes, suitable as core node in OBS (optical burst switched) networks. Optical codes are used for coding incoming bursts in order to perform the switching function. To this end the proposed switch architecture employs encoders and decoders and possible output contentions are solved in the wavelength domain by means of variable-input fixed-output wavelength converters. A core node with this architecture is compared with another bufferless core node architecture which employs a limited set of shared variable-input variable-output wavelength converters.In order to study the performance of the novel switch architecture, we have useda modular and flexible simulation tool, that we have developed and we call M\_OBS\_SIM(Modular OBS Simulator). The main figure of merit here investigated is the burstblocking probability as a function of different load conditions.The main result is that the novel switch architecture has shown the same performance in all scenarios as the node based on variable-input variable-output converters but at lower costs, since it does not make use of this kind of expensive converters.