Rate-Based Pacing for Small Buffered Optical Packet-Switched Networks

One of the difficulties of Optical Packet-Switched (OPS) networks is buffering optical packets in the network. O(1) reading operation is not possible in the optical domain, because there is no equivalent optical RAM available for storing packets. Currently, the only available solution that can be used for buffering in the optical domain is using long fiber lines called Fiber Delay Lines (FDL). However, FDLs have important limitations and may cause high packet drop rates due to the burstiness of Internet traffic.