Improvement of optical packet switching performance by employing partially shared buffering with shared wavelength converters

In this paper, we propose an optical switch that combines both shared tunable wavelength converter and partially shared buffering together. The packet contention can be resolved both in the time domain (output buffering and partially shared buffering) and frequency domain (wavelength conversion) simultaneously and switching performance can be greatly improved. Various simulations are carried out to show the performance of different buffering and wavelength conversion structures. The results confirm that the switching architecture we proposed has excellent performance.