Impact of the MAI and beat noise on the performance of OCDM/WDM Optical Packet Switches using Gold codes

Recent advances in optical devices greatly enhance the feasibility of Optical Code Division Multiplexing/Wavelength Division Multiplexing (OCDM/WDM) Optical Packet Switch. In this paper, the performance of an OCDM/WDM switch is investigated when impairment due to both Multiple Access Interference and Beat noise are taken into account. Analytical models are proposed to dimension the switch resources as the number of optical codes carried on each wavelength and the number of needed optical converters. The Packet Loss Probability due to output packet contentions is evaluated as a function of the main switch and traffic parameters when Gold coherent optical codes are adopted. When the available bandwidth is fixed for the WDM/OCDM signal, due to a statistical multiplexing effect, we show that the use of more length codes and fewer wavelengths lead to lower packet loss probability, especially for low offered traffic. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America