Rate-Based Pacing for Optical Packet Switched Networks With Very Small Optical RAM

The authors show that by applying rate-based pacing at the edge nodes, very small optical RAM buffers can be enough for high utilization and low packet drop ratio inside core Optical Packet-Switched (OPS) networks. Buffering optical packets in the network is one of the difficulties of Optical Packet-Switched (OPS) networks when compared with Electronic Packet-Switched (EPS). In EPS networks, contention of packets is resolved by storing the contended packets in an electronic Random Access Memory (RAM). Electronic RAM allows sending out the packets with O(1) reading operation when the output port is free. However, converting optical packets to electrical domain in order to use electronic RAM is not a feasible solution because of the processing limitations of EPS.