Designs of cell edge routers in the optical cell switching (OCS) network

Optical cell switching (OCS) is a new flexible all-optical switching paradigm. An OCS consists of cell edge routers (CER) and core switches (OCX). The CER is the interface between the electrical domain and the optical domain, while the OCX is the all optical packet switch without opto-electro-optical (OEO) conversion. In our previous research we have proposed a low complexity and highly scalable switch architecture for the OCX with several high performance scheduling algorithms. In this paper, we focus on the design of the CER. To maximize the optical bandwidth utilization and minimize the packet delay within the OCS, most of OCS intelligence and functionalities are build in the CER. To ensure the performance and the quality of the OCS network, we propose two practical and scalable switch architectures and corresponding efficient scheduling algorithms for ingress and egress CERs accordingly. We show by simulations that with the proposed scheduling algorithms both CERs can achieve /spl sim/100% throughput. Additionally, the complexity of both scheduling algorithms at two routers is only O(log(N)).