Multi-cabinet implementation for load-balanced optical switch

Abstract

Load-Balanced Optical Switch (LBOS) [20] ensures close-to-100% throughout and all-optical transmission between linecards. In this paper, we extend LBOS for multi-cabinet implementation. The challenges lie in the fact that the practical implementation requirements in single-cabinet LBOS become un-scalable for multi-cabinet scenario. First of all, we remove the restriction on LBOS that propagation delay (t p) between adjacent linecards must equal to the transmission time (t pkt) for sending one packet. The delay t p is relaxed to be any value, which can accommodate the long and unequal distances fibers among cabinets. Secondly, we outstrip the upper bound of switch size N = 160 in LBOS. The basic idea is that the adjacent linecards share an identical channel/wavelength. Then LBOS can be scaled to support the large switch size of multi-cabinet. Last but not least, a more feasible fair scheduler is devised to replace the original one in LBOS. The simulation results show that multi-cabinet LBOS yields a much better delay/throughput performance than other multi-cabinet optical switches (e.g. Fasnet [8]). © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.