Performance of an optical packet switch with parametric wavelength converters

In an optical packet switch (OPS), input fibers carry multiple wavelengths, which carry packets to one or more output fibers. As several wavelengths from different inputs could be destined to the same output fiber, one wavelength can be connected and the others remain disconnected, losing the carried packets. Because of the multiple wavelengths available at an output fiber, wavelength conversion in the OPS of the unconnected wavelengths into those available can increase the number of connections. A parametric wavelength converter (PWC) provides multi-channel wavelength conversion where wavelengths can be converted to another. A PWC uses a pump wavelength that can be flexibly chosen to define which wavelengths can be converted, defining the so-called wavelength conversion pairs. However, it is unknown which set of pump wavelengths, and therefore the set of connection pairs, should be selected to improve the OPS performance while minimizing the number of PWCs in the OPS. Therefore, this paper proposes a pump wavelength selection policy for an OPS that uses different pump wavelengths, one for each PWC, within an arbitrarily selected interval. This policy is called variety rich (VR) policy. This paper also introduces a non-wavelength blocking OPS (NWB-OPS) to make full use of PWCs. The switch performance is evaluated through computer simulation. The results show that the proposed policy with different pump wavelengths achieves the highest performance when compared to another of similar complexity. Furthermore, the performance study shows that small sizes of the interval to select a pump wavelength are more beneficial than larger ones.