| Over the past few years, the Internet traffic has grown rapidly and the optical transport bandwidth has been continuously increasing. These changes are stimulating the evolution of data networks. In such a dynamic environment, a network architecture that accommodates multiple data formats, supports high throughput, and is capable of flexible bandwidth provisioning is the key to the design and development of the next-generation Internet. The past evolution of Internet has proved that packet switching is a scalable, robust technology that is capable of adapting to various traffic patterns. Packet switching in the optical domain provides data-rate and data-format transparency, and it scales well to match the growing bandwidth of fiber optics. Furthermore, optical packet switching can remove the optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversion in the network and, therefore, reduce the footprint of the switches.;This dissertation examines the performance and design issues of optical packet-switched networks. It first presents a survey of the current state of the art in optical packet switching. Then, it investigates one of the most important design issues: contention resolution in time, wavelength, and space domains. Following this comprehensive study, it develops an analytical modeling technique, called PLATO, for evaluation of the network performance. The PLATO technique is an accurate approach applicable to various network topologies and switch architectures. After the PLATO model is a unified and extended study on contention-resolution schemes. This part of the dissertation introduces priority-based routing, which leads to the implementation of Class of Service (CoS). It also proposes an optical-electrical hybrid contention-resolution scheme that demonstrates excellent performance with a cost-effective switch architecture. Finally this dissertation explores the possibility of applying optical packet switching to metropolitan-area networks. |
