Extensions to the 'staggering switch' architecture

The author studies the performance of some extensions to the staggering switch, an almost-all-optical packet switch architecture based on two rearrangeably nonblocking stages interconnected by optical delay lines with different amounts of delay. In particular, the packet loss probability of the switch is investigated for bursty traffic, and a hardware modification that will make it possible to overcome the performance penalty of the time correlation is proposed. The switch growability patterns and an extension to the wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) case are discussed. A scheme that will allow optical packet synchronization for the synchronously operated switch is presented.<
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