Arrayed Waveguide Grating and Re-Circulating Buffer Based Optical Packet Switch

Abstract

Abstract Optical packet switching has gained popularity in past decade. However, due to technical challenges all- optical switching is not implemented till date, still hybrid switching where both optical and electrical switching are used simultaneously by-passing the limitations of both the technologies. In fiber delay lines (FDLs) buffering is limited due to accumulated losses and noises, and most of the times short term storage is enough in optical switching, but in case of long term storage, re-circulating type buffer can be used, but again due to accumulation of degrading terms re-circulation count is limited therefore in case of longer duration storage, electronic buffer is better choice. In this paper, we have proposed a hybrid buffer based optical switch where both optical and electronic buffers are used for storage of contending packets, and optical buffer is re-circulating in nature. The performance of the switch is measured in terms of bit error rate (BER) and packet loss probability, and BER performance is compared with recently proposed design, and it has been found that the proposed switch is comparatively much superior to earlier one.