Tracing an Optical Buffer's Performance: An Effective Approach

Optical Burst Switching proposes a future-proof alternative to the current electronic switching in the backbone. The involved optical buffers are implemented with a set of Fiber Delay Lines, and suffer serious performance loss, when compared to RAM. Various existing models trace this loss, but either lack generality, accuracy, or effectiveness. The optical buffer model we constructed is valid for general line lengths and burst sizes. An effective approach allowed to strongly reduce the solution’s complexity, while remaining exact. This document presents the key formulas and performance graphs. The obtained model serves as a basic optimization tool, yielding results fast. keywords: OBS, optical buffer, FDL, fiber delay lines, discrete-time optimization.