Optical Packet Switching: A Network Perspective

In the last few years research on WDM optical packet-switching has mainly concentrated on issues at the single node level. The goal of this paper is to discuss about the problems arising when the focus is moved toward a network-wide scope. In particular, an overview of routing techniques that may be adopted in an optical packet-switched backbone is presented, showing the effects of adaptive multi-path routing strategies on the network performance. Furthermore, performance differentiation based on different routing and contention resolution strategies is proposed and analyzed in a simple QoS-aware scenario. Then, the application of adaptive routing strategies to network recovery in case of single link failure and the effects of dynamic multi-wavelength management and multi-path routing on packet sequence are also discussed.