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Optical Packet Switching

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Enabling Optical Internet with Advanced Network Technologies

Part of the book series: Computer Communications and Networks ((CCN))

Abstract

This chapter provides an outline of the main concepts and issues related to optical packet switching (OPS). The basic network functions required by this paradigm are discussed and references to past and current research on the topic are provided. Optical packet switching is a transport technique that assumes information to be organized in packets formed by a payload and a header both encoded as optical signals. The payload is transferred through the network without any optical to electronic conversion. The header is processed in the early phase in the electronic domain. Optical packet switching may be considered as a long-term and more flexible alternative to the circuit-switched optical networks currently being deployed by operators. This innovative paradigm aims at optimizing the utilization of the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) channels by means of fast and highly dynamic resource allocation, overcoming the inefficiency typical of the circuit transfer modes. Traditionally, packet transfer modes have proved to be very flexible by nature, with respect to bandwidth exploitation. In fact, link capacity is shared in time by means of statistical multiplexing, while contentions occurring at each node are solved by storing packets as long as the required resources become available again. Therefore, network links are in general used more efficiently in OPS than in circuit-switching.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The delay buffer is assumed degenerate consistent with the previous section.

  2. 2.

    For the sake of simplicity, in this work we always consider W to be a multiple of L.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems, Universit di Bologna, Italy

    Carla Raffaelli, Walter Cerroni & Michele Savi

  2. Institute of Communication Networks, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

    Slavisa Aleksic

  3. Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems, Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, Italy

    Franco Callegati

  4. Department of Electronics and Information, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Guido Maier & Achille Pattavina

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  1. Carla Raffaelli
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    Raffaelli, C. et al. (2009). Optical Packet Switching. In: Aracil, J., Callegati, F. (eds) Enabling Optical Internet with Advanced Network Technologies. Computer Communications and Networks. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-278-8_3

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