On the design of optical buffer for optical input-queued switches with quality of service guarantees

This paper presents a quality of service (QoS) enable optical delay line (ODL) architecture to solve the problem of resource contention and support multilevel priority queues in an optical packet switch. ODL has been used in optical packet switches to resolve resource contention; however, the packets travel continuously in ODL limits the management of random access of the packets and increases the packet loss probability. Moreover, multiple ODL sets usually are needed to realize multiple priority queues in order to support QoS. In this paper, a new Unicast Recirculatiion ODL (URODL) architecture is proposed to resolve the output contention problem in an input-queued optical packet switch. To improve relatively poor throughput due to the head of Line (HOL) blocking in the input-queued switch, we modify URODL to support a more efficient window-based lookahead scheduling algorithm. Furthermore, a control strategy is designed to turn a single set of URODL into multiple logical queues to hold different priority packets. The simulation results show our URODL model reduces packet loss effectively with the capability to support QoS. This URODL model can be easily implemented and managed in a fast optical packet switch.