Threshold schemes for optical flow switching

Abstract

IP routers are difficult to scale to very high rates due to the significant amount of electronic processing required for each IP packet. In WDM networks, an alternative to IP routing is Optical Flow switching. The idea behind the Optical Flow switching is to set up WDM cut-trough transmissions for large messages. Unfortunately, current WDM systems only have a limited number of channels that can be used for cut-through transmissions. This work investigates the performance of several schemes that calculate a threshold for determining whether a message is sent over IP or over a WDM cut-through. We discuss the performance of static schemes which do not vary the threshold and dynamic schemes which vary threshold in response to changing network conditions.