Dimensioning of the wavelength converters in a WDM optical packet switch

This paper analyzes the performances of a WDM optical packet switch making use of fiber delay lines to resolve output packet contentions; the optical packet switch is equipped with tunable wavelength converters which can shift optical packets to any wavelength of the output link which they are directed to. As not all packets need conversion, we propose a dimensioning technique allowing to reduce the number of converters and to improve the signal quality by reducing unnecessary conversions. The obtained results show that a remarkable reduction of the number of converters is obtained with respect to that needed by other switches described in literature. Such a saving is achieved by maintaining the packet loss probability below a prefixed threshold.