Analysis and Performance Evaluation of Optical Buffers

Abstract — How are future communication networks to cope with everincreasing traffic demands? Currently, data (e.g. IP packets) handled in the back-bone network is transported optically, yet is switched electronically. Being a demanding and power-consuming process, current switches are becoming the bottleneck in the network. More recent techniques, such as Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS), can alleviate this problem. In the research community’s search for effective architectures, understanding the functioning of optical buffers is crucial. My PhD research focuses on the analysis and performance evaluation of optical buffers. Extensive use of probability generating functions allows to incorporate several environment aspects in a single stochastic model. Results elucidate the behaviour of a specific switch implementation, and lead to optimal constellations of the involved design parameters. Further research aims at results for (i) traffic assumptions that are less stringent and (ii) switch architectures of higher complexity. Keywords—fiber delay lines; optical buffers; stochastic modelling I