Performance of An Multicast-enabled Optical Packet Switch Using a Prioritized Packet Scheduling Scheme

This paper evaluates and analyzes the traffic performance of our recently proposed multicast-enabled optical packet switch under a hybrid traffic model. A prioritized packet scheduling algorithm is proposed for the output contention resolution of the switch. The simulation results show that the multicast packet loss probability can be greatly improved by slightly increasing the number of multicast modules in conjunction with the proposed packet scheduling. For a given effective traffic load, the improvement on the total packet loss probability by increasing the number of multicast modules is related to the multicast traffic proportion. It is also shown that the average packet delay for the switch is little affected by increasing the number of multicast modules since the multicast packets are given higher priority than the unicast packets.