Novel Passive Optical Switching Using Shared Electrical Buffer and Wavelength Converter

We propose a novel optical switching system using fast time-slotted passive switching with shared OEO buffers. Simulation results show that the proposed system significantly reduces the blocking probability below 10 at a 28% cost of a traditional system due to flexibility of contention resolution using electrical buffer and potentially requires very low power consumption. The proposed switching system is believed to be a technoeconomically feasible and implementable solution for optical packet and burst switching with current optical technologies.