Enhancement of an optical burst switch with shared electronic buffers

Future data networks face an energy consumption challenge: traffic grows exponentially, but the energy cost per bit in electronic routers and switches does not decrease so fast. All-optical switching techniques have not delivered a solution to this problem: despite their requiring fewer energetically-costly optical-to-electronic conversions, they suffer from poor contention handling even at low network loads, thus needing heavy overprovisioning, which negates the energy savings achieved in the first place. This contention issue largely stems from the lack of sufficiently-mature optical buffers. Thus a proposition of hybrid switch architecture supplementing optical switching with an electronic buffer.