An Optical Interconnection Architecture for Large Packet Switches [Invited]

A. BIANCO, E. CARTA, D. CUDA, J. M. FINOCHIETTO, F. NERI

Roma, Italia

Conferencia; IEEE International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks (ICTON 2007); 2007

The design of switching architectures for today's telecommunication networks needs to consider the limitsimposed by electronic technology; in particular, it must take into account power consumption and dissipation, aswell as power supply and footprint requirements. Currently, optical technology is exploited mainly fortransmission over optical links requiring large bandwidth-distance products; however, many researchers andswitch architects believe that its introduction for switching functions can overcome most of the current designlimits. Since many years, the research community has been studying not only solutions that make use of opticsinside electronic switches but that also switching architectures that implement optical switching without any needof optoelectronic conversion. In this paper, we propose an optical switching architecture based on a WDM(Wavelength Division Multiplexing) optical bus, aiming at interconnecting electronic line cards inside packetswitches. In particular, the use of distributed packet scheduling techniques is addressed and its performance isdiscussed.