Wavelength and time domain exploitation for QoS management in optical packet switches

This paper addresses the problem of congestion resolution and quality of service differentiation in optical packet switching. The paper shows that by designing congestion resolution algorithms that combine the use of the wavelength and the time domain it is possible to significantly reduce information loss phenomena and also to guarantee quality of service differentiation among traffic classes. In particular this is achieved by means of QoS algorithms specifically designed to exploit the characteristics of optical technology and then resulting different from QoS techniques typically implemented in electronic networks. Performance evaluation obtained by simulation shows the influence of the main system parameters on packet loss probability and delay for two service classes.