Optical Packet Switch Based on Dynamic Pump Wavelength Selection

This paper proposes an optical packet switch with parametric wavelength converters (PWCs), where the pump wavelengths are dynamically changed in every time slot. It is called the dynamic pump wavelength selection (DPS) switch. A PWC, which performs multiple wavelength conversion, uses a pump wavelength that can be flexibly chosen to define which wavelengths can be converted. To enhance switch performance, the DPS switch employs a matching scheme, which sets connections between input and output ports, in combination with dynamic pump wavelength selection; a conventional switch, on the other hand, performs matching with a given set of pump wavelengths that are configured in a static manner. The dynamic pump wavelength selection is used to select the pump wavelength for each PWC to maximize the number of wavelength conversion pairs supported. Numerical results from a simulation show that the DPS switch provides lower blocking rates than the conventional switch with pump wavelengths assigned statically, under both uniform and nonuniform traffic.