The Case of a Precognition Optical Packet Switch

Abstract

This paper describes simulation analysis of an optical packet switch that has a limited capability to "see" packets that have not yet arrived at the input port. The goal of the effort is to design a variable-length optical packet switch without random access buffering. Relying on this future information, the switch tries to maximize the number of bytes switched. While we found that this optimization does not improve the throughput significantly, we are currently studying improvements of this architecture that hold greater promise.