Investigation of a hybrid optical-electronic switch supporting different service classes

Optical fiber is considered the most competitive wired transmission support thanks to its low attenuation, wide optical bandwidth, long reach, and low cost. However, optics do not yet perform higher functionalities such as switching. In fact, all-optical switches face a contention issue, due to the lack of practical optical buffers. Thus, the switching function is still performed electronically, which requires energetically costly optical-to-electronic conversions. The energy consumption is a critical issue within the growing data traffic. Thus, a proposition of hybrid switch architecture supplementing optical switch with an electronic buffer. In this paper, we propose to investigate the performance of hybrid switch that supports different priority classes where the priority is defined in terms of Packet Loss Ratio (PLR). We show that the hybrid switch is a good trade off since it allows significant performance improvements towards a buffer-less all optical switch in terms of PLR and sustainable load, for relatively few electronic ports of the buffer, which would reduce energy consumption compared to an electronic switch.