P. Pavon-Mariño, J. Garcia-Haro, and J. Malgosa-Sanahuja (Spain)
Optical Packet Switching, Large-Scale Switch Fabrics, Optical Network.
Optical Packet Switching (OPS) technology for backbone networks is still far from commercial deployment. But as optical technology becomes more mature, unavoidable advantages of packet switching in terms of bandwidth sharing and resources allocation will convert this alternative as more desirable. In that moment, large-scale OPS will be crucial for the backbone network, requiring switch fabrics ranging thousands of input and output ports. The design of this type of large-scale OPS switches is an open research field with many unresolved questions. For this, we feel that a discussion and review of the main growability alternatives of OPS switch fabrics is of interest. This paper surveys a set of selected architecture proposals, analyzing the growth strategies, strengths and weaknesses. As we will see, further work and extensive investigation effort is still necessary for most of them. For this, open issues are highlighted, which are indeed a starting point for further research.
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