A Wavelength-Routed Multicast Packet Switch With a Shared-FDL Buffer

In this paper, we propose a wavelength-routed multicast packet switch using a set of fiber delay lines as a shared buffer for both unicast and multicast packets. To avoid multicast packet contention, a multicast packet could be replicated in multiple timeslots by means of multi-wavelength conversion in conjunction with the shared-FDL buffer. Moreover, a packet scheduling technique is designed to assist the operation of the newly proposed switch. We investigate the traffic performance and the complexity in terms of component counts of the newly proposed switch in comparison with our previously reported multicast switch and the broadcast-and-select switch by simulation. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed switch with assistance of the packet scheduling technique can effectively avoid the performance deterioration caused by the increase of multicast traffic, leading to a much better performance than our previously reported multicast switch. In addition, the results show that the proposed switch exhibits an efficient and cost-effective configuration for packet multicasting over other switch architectures.