Performance modeling of hybrid optical packet switches with shared buffer

All-optical packet switches (OPS) are considered as a good candidate for future ultra-fast communications as they do not require optical-electronic- optical (O/E/O) conversions. However, currently there is still no practical optical random access memory available, which makes it difficult to reduce packet loss to an acceptable level in OPS. Thus, hybrid optical/electronic switch architectures, such as the switch proposed in [2] which we refer to as the OpCut switch in this paper, are promising alternatives due to their potential to achieve ultra-low packet loss and packet delay. Although there has been extensive work on the performance modeling of different types of electronic and all-optical switches, little work has been done for the performance modeling of hybrid switches. In this paper, we present an efficient analytical model called the aggregation model that comprehensively analyzes various performance metrics of the OpCut switch under different types of traffic. By inductively aggregating more queues in the buffer into a block, the aggregation model can achieve a polynomial complexity to the switch size. We develop the aggregation model for the OpCut switch under both Bernoulli traffic and ON-OFF Markovian traffic. The effectiveness of our model is validated by extensive simulations. The results show that the aggregation model is very accurate in all tested scenarios.