Analysis of partially shared buffering for WDM optical packet switching

In this paper a new WDM packet switch architecture, Partially Shared Buffer ing, is proposed. This architecture, in addition to dedicating an individua l prime buffer for each output, incorporates a separate buffer for all the outputs to share, Based on this architecture, a lower packet loss probabili ty can be achieved without the need of either dramatically increasing the s ize of each prime output buffer or deploying a large number of wavelength c onverters. The performance of the new architecture has been extensively stu died by means of numerical simulations.