Performance Analysis of a Packet Prioritization Algorithm for Optical Packet Switching Networks

Abstract

Because of the explosive growth of network traffic, backbone networks move toward all-optical packet switching networks. However, optical buffers implemented by fiber delay line (FDL) have a volatile nature because of signal loss and noise accumulation problems from optical components of the FDL buffer. Because of this, scheduling packets becomes more difficult in the FDL buffer than in the RAM buffer, and requires additional design considerations for avoiding packet contention and packet loss from the volatile nature. Therefore, we propose a packet prioritization algorithm for all-optical packet switching networks with FDL buffers. The point of the packet prioritization algorithm is to rank packets in optimal balance between latency and residual distance. We optimize a relative-distance factor to achieve the lowest packet loss probability. Our simulation results show how various network parameters affect the optimal relativelatency factor.