Optical Networks: A Practical Perspective - Part 67 pdf

630 PHOTONIC PACKET SWITCHING Figure 12.10 Block diagram of a soliton-trapping logical AND gate. Figure 12.11 Illustration of the operation of a soliton-trapping logical AND gate. (a) Only one pulse is present, and very little energy passes through to the filter output. This state corresponds to a logical zero. (b) Both pulses are present, undergo wavelength shifts due to the soliton-trapping phenomenon, and most of the energy from one pulse passes through to the filter output. This state corresponds to a logical one. will not be selected by the filter. Thus the filter output has a pulse (logical one) only if both pulses are present at the input, and no pulse (logical zero) otherwise. 12.2 Synchronization 631 Figure 12.12 The function of a synchronizer. (a) The two periodic pulse streams with period T are out of synchronization; the top stream is ahead by AT. (b) The two periodic streams have been synchronized by introducing a delay AT in the top stream relative to the bottom stream. 12.2 Synchronization Synchronization is the process of aligning two pulse streams in time. In PPS networks, it can refer either to the alignment of an incoming pulse stream and a locally available clock pulse stream or to the relative alignment of two incoming pulse streams. Recall our assumption of fixed-size packets. Thus if framing pulses are used to mark the packet boundaries, the framing pulses must occur periodically. The function of a synchronizer can be understood from Figure 12.12. The two periodic pulse streams, with period T, shown in Figure 12.12(a) are not synchronized because the top stream is ahead in time by AT. In Figure 12.12(b), the two pulse streams are synchronized. Thus, to achieve synchronization, the top stream must be delayed by AT with respect to the bottom stream. The delays we have hitherto con- sidered, for example, while studying optical multiplexers and demultiplexers, have been fixed delays. A fixed delay can be achieved by using a fiber of the appropriate length. However, in the case of a synchronizer, and in some other applications in photonic packet-switching networks, a tunable delay element is required since the amount of delay that has to be introduced is not known a priori. Thus we will now study how tunable optical delays can be realized. 632 PHOTONIC PACKET SWITCHING c 1 Delay C 2 Delay Ck- 2 Delay ck- 1 Delay c k T/2 k- 2 T/2 k- 1 ,.12•215 ooo ,. Input switch~ ___~switchl Delayed pulse ] ~176176 pulse stream stream ~ ooo ~ ~ Stage 1 Stage k- 2 r Stage k- 1 Figure 12.13 A tunable delay line capable of realizing any delay from 0 to T - T/2 k-1 in steps of T/2 k-1. 12.2.1 Tunable Delays A tunable optical delay line capable of realizing any delay, in excess of a reference delay, from 0 to T- T/2 k-l, in steps of T/2 k-l, is shown in Figure 12.13. The parameter k controls the resolution of the delay achievable. The delay line consists of k- 1 fixed delays with values T/2, T/4 T/2 k-1 interconnected by k 2 • 2 optical switches, as shown. By appropriately setting the switches in the cross or bar state, an input pulse stream can be made to encounter or avoid each of these fixed delays. If all the fixed delays are encountered, the total delay suffered by the input pulse stream is T/2 + T/4 + + T/2 k-1 = T - T/2 k-1. This structure can be viewed as consisting of k - 1 stages followed by an output switch, as indicated in Figure 12.13. The output switch is used to ensure that the output pulse stream always exits the same output of this switch. The derivation of the control inputs Cl, c2 Ck to the k switches is discussed in Problem 12.3. With a tunable delay line like the one shown in Figure 12.13, two pulse streams can be synchronized to within a time interval of T/2 k. The value k, and thus the number of fixed delays and optical switches, must be chosen such that 2-kT << r, the pulse width. The resolution of the delay line is determined by the speed of the switches used and the precision to which the delay lines can be realized. Practically, the resolution of this approach may be on the order of 1 ns or so. We can use this approach to provide coarse synchronization. We will also need to perform fine synchronization to align bits to within a small fraction of a bit interval. One approach is to use a tunable wavelength converter followed by a highly dispersive fiber line [Bur94]. If D denotes the dispersion of the fiber used, A)~ the output wavelength range, and L the length of the fiber, then we can get a relative delay variation of 0 to DA~.L. If the output wavelength can be controlled in steps of 3)~, then the delay resolution is D3)~L. 12.2 Synchronization 633 Given a tunable delay, the synchronization problem reduces to one of determining the relative delay, or phase, between two pulse streams. A straightforward approach to this problem is to compare all shifted versions of one stream with respect to the other. The comparison can be performed by means of a logical AND operation. This is a somewhat expensive approach. An alternative approach is to use an optical phase lock loop to sense the relative delay between the two pulse streams. Just as more than one phenomenon can be used to build an optical AND gate, different mechanisms can be used to develop an optical phase lock loop. We discuss one such mechanism that is based on the NOLM that we studied in Section 12.1.3. 12.2.2 Optical Phase Lock Loop Consider an NOLM that does not use a separate nonlinear element but rather uses the intensity-dependent refractive index of silica fiber itself as the nonlinearity. Thus if a low-power pulse stream, say, stream 1, is injected into the loop~from arm A of the directional coupler in Figure 12.8(a)~the fiber nonlinearity is not excited, and both the clockwise and the counterclockwise propagating pulses undergo the same phase shift in traversing the loop. As a consequence, no power emerges from the output (arm B) in this case. If a high-power pulse stream, say, stream 2, is injected in phase (no relative delay) with, say, the clockwise propagating pulse stream, because of the intensity dependence of the refractive index of silica fiber, the refractive index seen by the clockwise pulse, and hence the phase shift undergone by it, is different from that of the counterclockwise pulse. This mismatch in the phase shift causes an output to emerge from arm B in Figure 12.8(a). Note that if the high-power pulse stream is not in phase (has a nonzero relative delay) with the clockwise propagating pulse stream, the clockwise and counterclockwise pulses undergo the same phase shift, and no output emerges from arm B of the directional coupler. To achieve synchronization between pulse streams 1 and 2, a tunable delay element can be used to adjust their relative delays till there is no output of stream 1 from the NOLM. Note that the same problem of discriminating between the pulse streams 1 and 2 at the output of the directional coupler (arm B) as with the TOAD arises in this case as well. Since pulses from stream 2 will always be present at the output, in order to detect the absence of pulses from stream 1, the two streams must use different wavelengths or polarizations. When different wavelengths are used, because of the chromatic dispersion of the fiber, the two pulses will tend to walk away from each other, and the effect of the nonlinearity (intensity-dependent refractive index) will be reduced. To overcome this effect, the two wavelengths can be chosen to lie symmetrically on either side of the zero-dispersion wavelength of the fiber so that the group velocities of the two pulse streams are equal. 634 PHOTONIC PACKET SWITCHING A phase lock loop can also be used to adjust the frequency and phase of a local clock source~a mode-locked laser~to those of an incoming periodic stream. We have seen in Section 3.5.1 that the repetition rate, or frequency, of a mode-locked laser can be determined by modulating the gain of the laser cavity. We assume that the modulation frequency of its gain medium, and hence the repetition rate of the pulses, is governed by the frequency of an electrical oscillator. The output of the NOLM can then be photodetected and used to control the frequency and phase of this electrical oscillator so that the pulses generated by the local mode-locked laser are at the same frequency and phase as that of the incoming pulse stream. We refer to [Bar96] and the references therein for the details. Another synchronization function has to do with extracting the clock for the purposes of reading parts of the packet, such as the header, or for demultiplexing the data stream. This function can also be performed using an optical phase-locked loop. However, this function can also be performed by sending the clock along with the data in the packet. In one example [BFP93], the clock is sent at the beginning of the packet. At the switching node, the clock is separated from the rest of the packet by using a switch to read the incoming stream for a prespecified duration corresponding to the duration of the clock signal. This clock can then be used to either read parts of the packet or to demultiplex the data stream. 12.3 Header Processing For a header of fixed size, the time taken for demultiplexing and processing the header is fixed, and the remainder of the packet is buffered optically using a delay line of appropriate length. The processing of the header bits may be done electron- ically or optically, depending on the kind of control input required by the switch. Electrically controlled switches employing the electro-optic effect and fabricated in lithium niobate (see Section 3.7) are most commonly used in switch-based network experiments today. In this case, the header processing can be carried out electron- ically (after the header bits have been demultiplexed into a parallel stream). The packet destination information from the header is used to determine the outgoing link from the switch for this packet, using a look-up table. For each input packet, the look-up table determines the correct switch setting, so that the packet is routed to the correct output port. Of course, this leads to a conflict if multiple inputs have a packet destined for the same output at the same time. This is one of the reasons for having buffers in the routing node, as explained next. If the destination address is carried in the packet header, it can be read by demultiplexing the header bits using a bank of AND gates, for example, TOADs, as shown in Figure 12.7. However, this is a relatively expensive way of reading 12.4 Buffering 635 the header, which is a task that is easier done with electronics than with optics. Another reason for using electronics to perform this function is that the routing and forwarding functions required can be fairly complex, involving sophisticated control algorithms and look-up tables. With this in mind, several techniques have been proposed to simplify the task of header recognition. One common technique is to transmit the header at a much lower bit rate than the packet itself, allowing the header to be received and processed relatively easily within the routing node. The packet header could also be transmitted on a wavelength that is different from the packet data. It could also be transmitted on a separate subcarrier channel on the same wavelength. All these methods allow the header to be carried at a lower bit rate than the high-speed data in the packet, allow- ing for easier header processing. However, given the high payload speeds involved in order to maintain reasonable bandwidth utilization without making the packet size unreasonably large, we will have to use fairly short headers and process them very quickly this may not leave much room for sophisticated header processing. See Problem 12.5 for an example. 12.4 Buffering In general, a routing node contains buffers to store the packets from the incoming links before they can be transmitted or forwarded on the outgoing links. Hence the name store and forward for these networks. In a general store-and-forward network, electronic or optical, the buffers may be present at the inputs only, at the outputs only, or at both the inputs and the outputs, as shown in Figure 12.2. The buffers may also be integrated within the switch itself in the form of random access memory and shared among all the ports. This option is used quite often in the case of electronic networks where both the memory and switch fabric are fabricated on the same substrate, say, a silicon-integrated circuit, but we will see that it is not an option for optical packet switches. We will also see that most optical switch proposals do not use input buffering for performance-related reasons. There are at least three reasons for having to store or buffer a packet before it is forwarded on its outgoing link. First, the incoming packet must be buffered while the packet header is processed to determine how the packet must be routed. This is usually a fixed delay that can be implemented in a simple fashion. Second, the required switch input and/or output port may not be free, causing the packet to be queued at its input buffer. The switch input may not be free because other packets that arrived on the same link have to be served earlier. The switch output port may not be free because packets from other input ports are being switched to it. Third, after the packet has been switched to the required output port, the outgoing link 636 PHOTONIC PACKET SWITCHING i switchl ~lswitchl ~lswitc~ "1 I "1 I "7 I : " Figure 12.14 tecture. Example of a 2 x 2 routing node using a feed-forward delay line archi- from this port may be busy transmitting other packets, thus making this packet wait for its turn. The latter delays are variable and are implemented differently from the fixed delay required for header processing. The lack of good buffering methods in the optical domain is a major impediment. Unlike the electronic domain, we do not have random access memory in the optical domain. Instead the only way of realizing optical buffers is to use fiber delay lines, which consist of relatively long lengths of fiber. For example, about 200 m of fiber is required for 1 #s of delay, which would be sufficient to store 10 packets, each with 1000 bits at 10 Gb/s. Thus usually very small buffers are used in photonic packet-switching networks. Note that unlike an electronic buffer, a packet cannot be accessed at an arbitrary point of time; it can exit the buffer only after a fixed time interval after entering it. This is the time taken for the packet to traverse the fiber length. This constraint must be incorporated into the design of PPS networks. Of course, by repeated traversals of the same piece of fiber, packet delays that are multiples of this basic delay can be obtained. PPS networks typically make use of delay lines in one of two types of con- figurations. Figure 12.14 shows one example of a feed-forward architecture. In this configuration, a two-input, two-output routing node is constructed using three 2 x 2 switches interconnected by two delay lines. If each delay line can store one packet that is, the propagation time through the delay line is equal to one slot the routing node has a buffering capacity of two packets. If packets destined for the same output arrive simultaneously at both inputs, one packet will be routed to its correct output, and the other packet will be stored in delay line 1. This can be accomplished by setting switch 1 in the appropriate state. This packet then has the opportunity to be routed to its desired output in a subsequent slot. For example, if no packets arrive in the next slot, this stored packet can be routed to its desired output in the next slot by setting switches 2 and 3 appropriately. The other configuration is the feedback configuration, where the delay lines connect the output of the switch back to its input. We will study this configuration in Section 12.4.3. 12.4 Buffering 637 There are several options for dealing with contention resolution in an optical switch. The first option is to provide sufficient buffering in the switch to be able to handle these contentions. We will see in order to achieve reasonable packet loss probabilities, the buffers need to be able to accommodate several hundred pack- ets. As we have seen above, this is not a trivial task in the context of optical buffers. Another option is to drop packets whenever we have contentions. This is not attractive because such events will occur quite often unless the links are occupied by very few packets compared to their capacities. For each such event, the source must retransmit the packet, causing the effective link utilization to drop even farther. A third option is to use the wavelength domain to help resolve conflicts. This can help reduce the amount of buffering required in a significant way. The final option is for the packet to be misrouted by the switch, that is, transferred by the switch to the wrong output. This option, termed deflection routing, has received considerable study in the research literature on PPS networks. We start by describing the various types of buffering, and the use of the wave- length domain to resolve conflicts, followed by deflection routing. The switch architectures used in the following section are idealized versions for illustration only; we will look at some actual proposals and experimental configurations in Section 12.6. 12.4.1 Output Buffering Consider the switch with output buffering shown in Figure 12.15. Let us assume that time is divided into slots and packets arriving into the switch are aligned with respect to these time slots. In each time slot, we have packets arriving at the input ports. Of these, one or more packets may have to be switched to the same output port. In the worst case, we could have a packet arriving at each input port, with all these packets destined to a single output port. In this case, if the switch is designed to operate at N times the line rate (N being the number of ports), these packets can all be switched onto the output port. However, only one of these packets can be transmitted out during this time slot, and the other packets will have to stored in the output buffer. If the output buffer is full, then packets will have to be dropped. The packet loss probability indicates how frequently packets are dropped by the switch. For each such event, the source must retransmit the packet causing the effective link utilization to drop even farther. We can minimize the packet loss probability by increasing the buffer size. With sufficiently large output buffers, an output-buffered switch has the best possible performance with respect to packet delay and throughput, compared to other switch architectures. The throughput can be viewed as the asymptotic value 638 PHOTONIC PACKET SWITCHING Figure 12.15 A generic switch with output buffers. of the offered load at which the packet delay through the switch becomes very large (tends to infinity). We can use a simple model to understand the performance of the different buffer- ing techniques. The model assumes that in each time slot, a packet is received at the input with probability p. Thus p denotes the traffic load. It further assumes that traffic is uniformly distributed, and therefore the packet is destined to a particular output port with probability 1/N, where N is the number of ports on the switch. While this is admittedly not a very realistic model, it gives some understanding of the trade-offs between the different buffering approaches. The parameters of interest are the desired packet loss probability, the number of packet buffers needed, and the traffic load. The number of packet buffers suggested by this model is typically smaller than what is actually required, since in reality traffic is more bursty than what is assumed by this model. For the output-buffered switch, this simple model was analyzed in [HK88], which shows that to get a packet loss of 10 -6 at a traffic load of 0.8, we need about 25 packet buffers per output. With sufficiently large buffers, a throughput close to 1 can be obtained. One issue with the output-buffered switch is that the switch needs to operate at N times the line rate per port. That is, it needs to be able to switch up to N packets per time slot from different inputs onto the same output. This is quite difficult to implement with optical switches. For this reason, many optical switch proposals emulate an output-buffered switch while still operating at the line rate per port. If multiple packets arriving in a time slot are all destined to the same output port, the switch schedules different delays for each of these packets at the input so that they get switched to the output in different succeeding time slots. For example, the switch handles the first packet immediately, delays the next packet by one time slot at the input, delays the next by two slots, and so on. 12.4 Buffering 639 Figure 12.16 Head-of-line blocking in an input-buffered switch. Observe that the packet destined for output 1 in input buffer 2 is blocked despite the fact that the output is free. 12.4.2 12.4.3 Input Buffering A switch with input buffering has buffers at the input to the switch but not at the output. These switches have relatively poor throughput due to a phenomenon called head-of-line (HOL) blocking, which is illustrated in Figure 12.16. When we have multiple input packets at the head of the line destined to a single output port, only one packet can be switched through. The other packets, however, may block packets behind them from being switched in the same time slot. For example, in Figure 12.16, we have packets at port 1 and port 2 at the head of their lines, both destined for port 3. Say we switch the packet at port 1 onto port 3. The second packet in line behind the head-of-line packet on port 2 is destined to output port 1 but cannot be switched to that output, even though it is free. For the traffic model considered earlier, this HOL blocking reduces the achievable throughput to 0.58 for large switch sizes [HK88]. While we can improve the throughput by selecting packets other than just the one at the head of the line, this is quite complicated and not feasible in the context of optical switches. The other problem is that the packet's delay at the input buffer cannot be determined before placing the packet in the buffer because it depends on the other inputs. In the context of optical delay lines, it means that when the packet exits the delay line, we may still not be able to switch it through as the desired output may be busy. For these reasons, optical switches with input buffers only are not a good choice. Recirculation Buffering In this approach, the buffers connect the outputs back to the inputs. Typically, some of the switch ports are reserved for buffering only, and the output of these ports is connected back to the corresponding inputs via buffers. If multiple packets destined . 12.13 A tunable delay line capable of realizing any delay from 0 to T - T/2 k-1 in steps of T/2 k-1. 12.2.1 Tunable Delays A tunable optical delay line capable of realizing any delay, in. a wavelength that is different from the packet data. It could also be transmitted on a separate subcarrier channel on the same wavelength. All these methods allow the header to be carried at. is a somewhat expensive approach. An alternative approach is to use an optical phase lock loop to sense the relative delay between the two pulse streams. Just as more than one phenomenon can