AbstractIn the present scenario, data centers serve many functionalities like storage, transfer of data, supporting web applications, etc. In data centers, various levels of hierarchy different types of switches are required; therefore, multifunctional data centers are desired. This paper discusses a novel design for optical switch which can be placed at various levels of hierarchy. In the proposed design, multifunctionality contention resolution schemes which consider electronic and optical buffering and all-optical negative acknowledgment (AO-NACK) are considered. In buffering technologies, contending packets are stored in either in electronic RAM or in fiber delay lines. In case of the AO-NACK scheme, contending packets are blocked, and a negative acknowledgment is sent back to the transmitting node and blocked packets are retransmitted. For various considered schemes, Monte Carlo simulation have been performed, results in terms of packet loss probability are presented, and it has been found that the performance of optical buffering is much superior to electronic buffering and AO-NACK schemes. It is found that, in the AO-NACK scheme, the numbers of retransmitted packets due to contention blocking are 33,304 which can be reduced to 7, by using a small amount of buffer at each node.
