A novel switching system using shared wavelength converter and electrical buffer for next generation optical network

Abstract

The explosive growth of the Internet traffic has fueled the development of high-speed transmission systems. In order to support this trend, optical switching system has emerged as a promising solution which can transmit IP packet efficiently and the Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology are also considered. Yet, few technologies look promising to achieve the industry goals of current OPS and OBS to provide an ultimate bandwidth solution, up to peta-bits per second, with practical application requirements of performance, cost, power consumption, and form factor. For resolving the drawbacks, this thesis proposes a novel optical switching system by a passive switch with an active buffer module that consists of shared wavelength converters and electrical buffers. The proposed switching system can be achieved several orders of magnitude improvement in blocking probability compared with other currently utilized optical switching techniques as well as lower overall system cost, and the disadvantages of transparent switching systems are resolved by the proposed opaque optical switching system. To verify that the proposed switching system can achieve efficient system performance, we perform simulations and an analytical analysis in the respect of asynchronous and synchronous system. We also perform the cost analysis to show that the proposed switching system is more cost-effective than other currently utilized switching system. In conclusion, this thesis presents a structured engineering result for optimal switch architecture designs that may lead to a paradigm shift toward earlier commercial deployment of OPS and OBS networks.