Impact of the Electronic Architecture of Optical Slot Switching Nodes on Latency in Ring Networks

Abstract

Optical slot switching has formerly been proposed as a flexible solution for metropolitan ring networks to carry data traffic with a sub-wavelength switching granularity and with a good energy efficiency, which is enabled by optical transparency. In this paper, for the first time we propose several architectures for the electronic side of optical slot switching nodes to increase flexibility through the addition of electronic switches, working either at client packet granularity or at slot granularity; such electronic switches can be located at either transmitter side, receiver side, or both sides of a node, thereby decreasing traffic latency, at the expense of increased node cost and/or energy consumption. This paper focuses on the latency aspect. We investigate the impact of a timer that can be used to upper bound the slot insertion time on the medium. We also propose, a novel client packet queuing model in an optical slot switching ring and assess and compare the latency of these node architectures analytically, and with simulations.

Capacity-enhanced receivers for low-latency Burst Optical Slot Switching rings

“…In this paper, we consider that traffic is already aggregated into time slots. Matters pertaining to aggregation of client traffic into time slots are dealt with in [6], for instance. Consider the following scenario, depicted in Fig.…”

“…These rings were widely studied, from the point of view of the optical transmission technology, e.g., see [2,3], and from the point of view of achievable network performance [4][5][6]. Many works have shown the advantages of BOSS rings over the optical circuit switching technologies.…”

Optical Slot Switching Latency in Mobile Backhaul Networks

“…5 shows the mean queuing delay for each traffic type. Seemingly counter-intuitively, the queuing delay decreases as load increases for low loads; this is because queuing delay is then dominated by the time to actually fill the optical slots 5 . At higher loads the queuing delay mainly depends on channel congestion and queuing delay increases, as expected.…”

Optical receivers with multiple front-ends for low latency optical slot switching rings

“…see [3], [4], and from the point of view of achievable network performance [1], [5], [6]. Many works have shown the advantages of OSS rings over the optical circuit switching technologies.…”