Emulation of Optical PIFO Buffers

—With recent advances in optical technology, we are closer to building all-optical routers than ever before. A major problem in this area, however, is the lack of all-optical memories similar to what we have in electronics. To overcome this problem, recently, there have been several proposals that show how we can emulate First-In First-Out (FIFO) queues using a combination of fiber delay lines and switches. Unfortunately, FIFO queues cannot be used for implementing many link scheduling policies including weighted fair queuing, weighted round-robin, or strict priority, which are essential components of any modern router today. In this paper, we introduce an architecture based on fiber delay lines and optical switches that can be used for emulating Push-In First-Out (PIFO) queues. In a PIFO queue, an incoming packet can be pushed anywhere in the queue, and therefore it can be used for the implementation of various link scheduling policies. We describe a scheduling algorithm for this ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: GLOBECOM
• Authors: Houman Rastegarfar, Monia Ghobadi, Yashar Ganjali
• Keywords: GLOBECOM 2009, Link Scheduling Policies, Optical Switches, Telecommunications , fiber Delay Lines