Overcoming the Switching Bottlenecks in Wavelength-Routing, Multicast-Enabled Architectures

• Modular optical switch architectures combining wavelength routing based on arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) devices and multicasting based on star couplers hold promise for flexibly addressing the exponentially growing traffic demands in a cost- and power-efficient fashion. In a default switching scenario, an input port of the AWG is connected to an output port via a single wavelength. This can severely limit the capacity between broadcast domains, resulting in interdomain traffic switching bottlenecks. An unexplored solution to this issue is to exploit multiple AWG free spectral ranges (FSRs), i.e., to set up multiple parallel connections between each pair of broadcast domains. In this paper, we study, for the first time, the influence of the FSR count on the throughput of a multistage switching architecture and propose a generic and novel analytical framework to estimate the blocking probability. We assess the accuracy of our analytical results via Monte Carlo simulations. Our study points to significant improvements with a moderate increase in the number of FSRs. We show that an FSR count beyond four results in diminishing returns. Furthermore, to investigate the tradeoffs between the network- and physical-layer effects, we conduct a cross-layer analysis, taking into account pulse amplitude modulation and rate-adaptive forward error correction. We illustrate how the effective bit rate per port increases with an increase in the number of FSRs.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Telekommunikation (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Telecommunications (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Fysik -- Atom- och molekylfysik och optik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Physical Sciences -- Atom and Molecular Physics and Optics (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Fysik -- Den kondenserade materiens fysik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Physical Sciences -- Condensed Matter Physics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

switch architecture

Semiconductor optical amplifiers

Arrayed waveguide gratings

Arrayed waveguide grating (AWG)

Scheduling algorithms

blocking probability

free spectral range (FSR)

Couplers

coupler

physical layer

Optical switches

scheduling

multicast

Publication and Content Type

art (subject category)

ref (subject category)