On the choice of all-optical switches for optical networking

New real-time applications are being developed on computer networks for the management of different types of information and knowledge, and therefore, demand for more and more bandwidth is increased each year. All-optical networking can be the sole approach to provide the huge bandwidth required for future networks. The essential elements in such an optical network are optical switches. Four important parameters in optical switches are cost, the longest path, the shortest path, and the blocking status of optical switches. We provide formulations to obtain the number of switching elements, and the longest/shortest path performances. All these formulations are based on using 2times2 SEs to build an optical switch. The choice of optical switch is an important issue in the design of optical networks. In this paper, different optical switches such as Crossbar, Clos, Banyan, Batcher Banyan, Benes, Butterfly, Cantor, and Spanke switches are studied. We focus on the architectures of these switches and provide a comparison on the mentioned parameters in order to enable an optical network designer to choose an appropriate optical switch.