Node architecture design for all-optical IP packet switching

In order to support efficiently the fast-growing demand for transmission capacity, optical packet-switched systems seem to be strong candidates as they allow fast dynamic allocation of WDM channels combined with a high degree of statistical resource sharing. We propose the architecture of an input/shared-buffered optical packet switching node, for all-optical switching of IP traffic flows. Since a limited hardware complexity is a key requirement for all-optical switches, due to the high cost of optical components, different node configurations are compared in order to evaluate the effect of a hardware-complexity variation on the performance of the proposed architecture.