Tandem Architecture for Photonic Packet Switches

A new switch architecture is presented to enhance out-put queuing in photonic packet switches. Its appkication is for a packet switching enviroment based on the optical transport of fixed length packets. This architecture consists of a couple of cas-cading switching elements with output queuing, whose buffer ca-pacity is limited by photonic technology. The introduction of a suitable buffer management allows a very good and balanced ex-ploitation of the available optical memories, realized with fiber de-lay lines. In particular, packet loss performance is here evaluated showing the improvement with respect to the single switch and a way to design large optical switches is shown in order to meet broadband network requirements.