Analysis of partially shared buffering for WDM optical packet switching

A new WDM packet switch architecture, partially shared buffering, is proposed. This architecture, in addition to dedicating an individual prime buffer for each output, incorporates a separate buffer for all the outputs to share. Based on this architecture, a lower packet loss probability can be achieved without the need of either dramatically increasing the size of each prime output buffer or deploying a large number of wavelength converters. The performance of the new architecture has been extensively studied by means of numerical simulations.