Abstract
Power consumption is expected to become the main limiting factor for
scaling the current network architectures to capabilities of hundreds of
terabit or even petabits. The use of optical switching fabrics (SFs) could
relax the limitations to some extent but large optical buffers occupy larger
area and dissipate more power than electronic ones. In this paper, we
evaluate the power consumption of bufferless optical packet switches (OPSs),
using the wavelength conversion to solve the output packet contentions.
Sophisticated analytical models are introduced to evaluate the power
consumption of synchronous and asynchronous OPSs (SOPSs and AOPSs) versus
the offered traffic, the main switch parameters, and the used device
characteristics. The power consumption in SOPSs and AOPSs is compared when
commercial semiconductor optical amplifiers are used to implement SFs and
wavelength converters (WCs). The obtained results show that the high power
consumption in synchronization stage makes SOPS less effective than AOPS in
terms of power consumption. For instance, when the OPSs are dimensioned with
a sufficient number of WCs and offered traffic is 0.8, SOPS consumes 140% of
power more than does the AOPS. Finally, though power consumption due to
cooling system is not considered in the proposed model, we observe that both
SOPSs and AOPSs consume much less power per gigabit per second carried than
commercial routers.
© 2010 IEEE
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