Optical vs. electronic packet switching: myth and advantage in 5G time-critical applications

Abstract

We show by simulation that the throughput and delay of applications that require zero losses in 5G metropolitan networks are greatly improved by replacing current electronic packet switching (EPS) networks with optical packet switching (OPS) networks with bufferless switches (no RAM, no fiber-delay-lines) that do not implement any kind of circuit-switching. The reason is that the total lack of queueuing delays in the bufferless OPS switches more than compensates their high losses, allowing end-toend transport protocols to react faster to those losses and to ultimately offer applications lossless service with higher throughput and lower latencies than in EPS networks.