Optical Switching and Networking 5 (2008) 2–9

www.elsevier.com/locate/osn

Optical packet switching: A reality check

Rodney S. Tucker
ARC Special Research Centre for Ultra-Broadband Information Networks, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
University of Melbourne, Vic 3010, Australia

Received 4 June 2007; accepted 12 August 2007

Available online 23 August 2007

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the energy consumption in a number of optical switch fabric architectures for optical packet-
switched applications and compares them to electronic switch fabrics. Optical packet switching does not appear to offer any
substantial power consumption advantages over electronic packet switching. Therefore, there is no compelling case for optical
packet switching.
c 2008 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Keywords: Optical packet switching; Energy consumption

1. Introduction The purpose of the present paper is to undertake

In 1993, the present author published a paper [1]
that included the following opening statement: “Self-
routing photonic packet switches will be important
components for future all-optical networks”. In the
intervening years, other authors also introduced papers
with similar assertions about the future need for
photonic (i.e. optical) packet switching. Proponents
of optical packet switching often draw attention to
the limited bandwidth of electronic devices and the
supposed high bandwidth and low power consumption
of optical alternatives. In addition, it is often argued that
optical packet switches do not need optical to electronic
(O/E) and electronic to optical (E/O) conversions in the
signal path. However, just as the present author did not
justify the opening statement quoted above from [1],
assertions about the benefits of optical packet switching
are often not backed up by an analysis of the relative
merit of competing electronic and optical technologies.
E-mail address: r.tucker@ee.unimelb.edu.au.
a reality check on the viability of optical packet
switching. The focus of this paper is on the energy
consumption of competing optical and electronic
technologies. As the capacity of packet switches
grows, energy consumption will become an increasingly
important engineering consideration that will drive
the choices between competing technologies. A key
parameter in any comparison of optical and electronic
switch technologies is the energy required to pass each
bit of data through the switch. The energy per bit
and, to a lesser extent, the size of each device is the
most fundamentally important parameter for comparing
technologies in future packet switches. Whichever
technology dominates in the future (optics or
electronics), it will be required to consume significantly
less energy than the electronic devices in current-day
packet switches, and it should enable its integration
into very small packages. If optical technologies cannot
reduce the power consumption of packet switching,
they are unlikely to find application in future packet
switches [2].

c 2008 Published by Elsevier B.V.

1573-4277/$ - see front matter

doi:10.1016/j.osn.2007.08.001
 R.S. Tucker / Optical Switching and Networking 5 (2008) 2–9
In general, the two key functions performed on
packets as they pass through a packet switch are
(a) buffering, and (b) switching. A recent paper by
the present author [2] showed that buffering packets
in optical delay lines presents major challenges,
even when the buffer is very small. Delay lines
consume more energy and occupy a larger footprint
than electronic buffer technologies. The present paper
focuses on switching technologies used to route packets
from the input to the output of the switch.
The analysis presented here applies to a broad
class of packet-based switching architectures, including
the so-called photonic packet switches, optical packet
switches, and optical label switches. The power
consumption of a number of optical switch fabrics
for optical packet switching is investigated and this
is compared to estimates of power consumption in
electronic switch fabrics based on CMOS technology.
A key conclusion of this paper is that optical packet
switching does not appear to offer any substantial
advantages over electronic packet switching and there
is no compelling case for optical packet switching. This
paper is based on material presented at the Workshop on
Optical packet switching at PS’2006.
The comparisons in this paper are based on
aggressive but plausible projections of current optical
technology, and projections of CMOS electronics based
on the ITRS Semiconductor Roadmap [3]. The analysis
presented here uses a bit rate of 40 Gb/s, but the
conclusions will be similar when scaled to higher bit
rates such as 100 Gb/s.
2. Packet switch architectures
Fig. 1(a) and (b) show the key components of
the data plane of an electronic packet switch and an
optical packet switch, respectively. The input/output
(I/O) ports on the switches are connected to the
incoming and outgoing fibers via WDM demultiplexers
and multiplexers, respectively. There are F incoming
fibers and F outgoing fibers in Fig. 1. Each fiber carries
K wavelengths.
Buffers in a packet switch can be placed at the
input ports, at the output ports, or shared between the
inputs and outputs. In Fig. 1, buffers are located at the
output ports only. The number of output buffers is FK.
The electronic packet switch in Fig. 1(a) requires O/E
and E/O converters. A total of FK O/E converters are
required at each of the FK input ports and FK E/O
converters (not visible in Fig. 1(a)) are required at each
input to the output multiplexers. The wavelengths of
these E/O converters are configured so that each one of
3
them matches the wavelength of its multiplexer port. In
the electronic packet switch in Fig. 1(a), the forwarding
engines are linked directly to J parallel switching
fabrics. In the optical packet switch in Fig. 1(b), the
forwarding engine is an electronic processor that sits
outside the switch fabric. The switch fabric is an
FK × FK wavelength-interchanging cross connect. If
the packet switch is based on optical technologies, this
fabric must also be optical.
The FK × FK wavelength-interchanging cross
connect in Fig. 1(b) performs the same function as
the signal path of the routing engines in Fig. 1(a),
together with the J parallel electronic switch fabrics
in Fig. 1(a). One advantage of the electronic switch
fabric in Fig. 1(a) over the optical switch fabric in
Fig. 1(b) is that it does not require tuneable wavelength
converters. This is because an electronic switch fabric
uses electronic switching to direct each data stream to
the appropriate output port, where the E/O converter
only requires a fixed wavelength.
2.1. Optical switch fabrics
A key requirement of switch fabrics for packet
switches is that the switching time is small compared
to the packet length. The length of an IP packet
at 40 Gb/s can be between about 10 and 300 ns.
Therefore, in order to avoid inefficiencies in utilization
of the transmission channel, the switching of the fabric
time needs to be around 1 ns or less. Two optical
switch fabric architectures that are potentially capable
of switching speeds of this order are shown in Figs. 2
and 3. The fabric in Fig. 3 employs rapidly-tuneable
wavelength converters together arrayed waveguide
gratings (AWG’s) [4,5] and the fabric in Fig. 3 uses
an array of semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)
gates [6,7].
The switch in Fig. 2 is 3-stage CLOS architecture
and has 10,000 input and output ports. If each of
these ports operates at 40 Gb/s, the total throughput
of the switch fabric is 400 Tb/s. The switch fabric has
four stages of wavelength conversion. The first three
stages use tuneable wavelength converters, and the last
stage uses fixed wavelength converters. The wavelength
converters in Fig. 2 could either be all-optical (O/O)
devices such as SOA-based Mach Zhender wavelength
converters based on cross-phase modulation [8,9], or
optoelectronic (O/E/O) wavelength converters based
on optical receiver (O/E converter) connected to an
optical transmitter (E/O converter). There would be
many challenges in building and maintaining a large
switch fabric like the one in Fig. 2 because of the
4 R.S. Tucker / Optical Switching and Networking 5 (2008) 2–9

Fig. 1. Packet switch architectures. (a) Electrical packet switch. (b) Optical packet switch.

very large number of interconnecting fibers and the
very wide tuning range required by the tuneable
lasers. However, Fig. 2 illustrates that it is possible,
in principle, to scale this architecture to very large
throughput capacity.
The SOA-based switch in Fig. 3 is a 4 × 4 Benes
switch using an array of SOA gates [10]. Each of the
SOA gates is driven by a control circuit that switches the
gate on and off. As indicated in Fig. 3, the 4×4 switch is
made up of a number of 1×2 and 2×2 switches, each of
which uses a number of 3 dB couplers and SOA gates.
In principle, the switch fabric in Fig. 3 could be scaled
up to 10,000 ports, like the fabric in Fig. 2. The total
number of SOA gates required would be approximately
20,000 per stage, and the required number of stages
would be approximately 26.
 R.S. Tucker / Optical Switching and Networking 5 (2008) 2–9 5

Fig. 2. Optical switch fabric using AWG’s and wavelength converters.

Fig. 3. 4 × 4 Benes switch using an array of SOA gates.

There are three key issues that limit the ability of
SOA gate arrays to scale to large size and to operate at
low power dissipation [10]. The first of these limitations
is crosstalk. In order for a large array of SOA gates
to have low crosstalk, the on/off ratio of each SOA
gate needs to be very large—typically of the order of
50 dB. To achieve an on/off ratio of this order, each
individual SOA either needs to be long, or needs to be
cascaded with an optical attenuator. The problem with
these approaches is that they both require the SOA to
be operated at a high on-level drive current in order to
overcome the high losses that are needed to produce
the high on/off ratio. Typically, high on/off ratio SOA
gates consume around 0.5 W when biased in the “on”
state.
The second limitation on SOA gate arrays is caused
by the build up of spontaneous noise as the size
of the fabric and the number of cascaded amplifiers
increased. In addition to reducing the signal-to-noise
ratio, this build up of spontaneous noise leads to the
third limitation, namely a build up in the total noise
and signal power through the fabric [10]. This build up
of signal power means that SOA’s towards the output
stages of the switch fabric need to operate at high power
levels. This leads to an increase in the required drive
power to the SOA’s and a consequent increase in the
overall power consumption. Further, the accumulation
of noise as the optical signal passes through a large
switch negates one of the prime original reasons for
seeking optical transparency, because a large part of the
network noise budget is consumed by the switches.
6 R.S. Tucker / Optical Switching and Networking 5 (2008) 2–9
Fig. 4. Electronic switch fabric.
2.2. Electronic switch fabrics
A typical high-capacity commercial single-chip
electronic cross connect currently provides throughputs
of around 50 Gbit/ at a line rate of 4 Gb/s, with a power
consumption of 16 W [11]. This power consumption
corresponds to 30 pJ of energy per bit. Szymanski
et al. [12] have estimated that with readily-available
180 nm CMOS technology, single-chip throughputs of
the order of 5 Tb/s will be achievable, with power
consumption of the order of 26 W per chip (5 pJ/b).
Extrapolating these results to 22 nm CMOS technology,
and assuming that single-chip throughputs of 10 Tb/s
will be achievable, this leads to an estimate of a
switching energy of 1 pJ/b. Some electronic routers
include some buffering between stages of the switch.
For simplicity, this buffering is not considered in the
present analysis.
Fig. 4 shows a switch fabric using the same 3-stage
CLOS architecture as in the optical switch fabric in
Fig. 2. The three stages of switch blocks in Fig. 4
comprise a total of 500 switch blocks. Each of these
switch blocks is strictly non-blocking and contains
a number of interconnected chips. Optical or high-
speed electronic interconnects are provided between the
switch blocks. Note that in the optical switch fabric in
Fig. 2 and the electronic switch fabric in Fig. 4, only
those interconnects between stages that are carrying
data need to be active. This control strategy can save
a considerable amount of power.
The switch fabric in electronic routers usually
comprises a number J of parallel switch fabrics (see
Fig. 1(a)). Each of these J parallel fabrics has the
structure in Fig. 4. The effective bit rate of the cells as
they pass through each of the J parallel switch fabrics
is 40/J Gb/s in a packet switch with a line rate of 40
Gb/s. In the estimates presented in Section 3 of the
power consumption of an electronic switch fabric, the
energy per bit in each switch block is taken to be 1
pJ/b and is assumed to be independent of the bit rate
in the J parallel fabrics (i.e. independent of J ). For the
calculations presented here, the energy consumption of
the interconnects in Fig. 4 is taken to be 0.4 pJ/b and is
assumed to be independent of bit rate in the J parallel
fabrics.
As shown in Fig. 1(a), the forwarding engine in
electronic routers plays an active role in switching the
cells to the J parallel switching planes. In optical packet
switches (Fig. 1(b)) the forwarding engine does not
provide this function. To provide a fair comparison
between optical and electronic switch fabrics, it is
necessary to include the energy consumed by the
forwarding engine in switching the cells to and from
the electronic switch fabric. In the data presented in the
next section, we have assumed that an additional 1 pJ of
switching energy per bit is consumed by the forwarding
engine.
3. Power consumption in optical switch fabrics
In this section, we develop an energy dissipation
model of an optical switch fabric and use this model
to identify power dissipation “hot spots” in the switch
fabric.
Fig. 5 is a schematic of the internal components
of a wavelength-interchanging optical cross connect
switch fabric for packet switching. Also shown in Fig. 5
are one of the input demultiplexers, one of the output
multiplexers, and three of the output buffers. The shaded
rectangle in Fig. 4 represents the FK × FK wavelength-
interchanging switch fabric in Fig. 1(b). The number of
 R.S. Tucker / Optical Switching and Networking 5 (2008) 2–9
Fig. 5. Wavelength-interchanging optical cross connect switch fabric for packet switching.
incoming and outgoing fibers is F. Each fiber carries
K wavelengths as shown. The number of bits in each
packet at each wavelength is N and the input power of
each packet is Pin . The cross connect sends packets on
each input port to an appropriate output port where the
packets are buffered and re-multiplexed back onto a set
of outgoing fibers at a power level of Pout .
The key functional blocks in the switch fabric are
tuneable wavelength converters (TWC’s) and fixed
wavelength converters (FWC’s), switches or arrayed-
waveguide grating multiplexers (AWG’s), and ampli-
fiers to overcome losses. For simplicity, Fig. 5 shows
only one stage of TWC’s. However, multiple stages will
generally be required. The output wavelength converter
stages connect, via buffers, to multiplexer ports with
defined wavelengths. For this reason, these wavelength
converters are fixed.
Losses in the switch fabric typically arise in
the AWG’s and/or the switches. In addition, some
wavelength converter technologies introduce losses that
need to be compensated. Other potential causes of loss
are interconnects between components of the switch
fabric.
It is sometimes argued that an advantage of optical
packet switching is that it permits the so-called
deflection routing in the wavelength domain and in the
space (i.e. fiber) domain to reduce the required capacity
of the buffers. In other words, packets that experience a
contention at the output port can be diverted either to a
different wavelength on the desired fiber or onto another
fiber, provided this alternate fiber ultimately leads to the
desired destination. In principle, deflection routing can
also be used in electronic packet switching. However,
this requires some form of alternate route processing
and is likely to result in out-of-order packet delivery.
7
Another potential advantage of optical switching is
that it is possible, in principle, to route a group of
wavelengths or a waveband through the switch fabric.
This is illustrated in Fig. 5, where M packets are
simultaneously switched at one port of a switch or AWG
internal to the switch fabric. By routing a waveband
of M wavelengths on each port of the internal switch,
the number of ports on the internal switch is reduced
from KF to KF/M, as shown in Fig. 5. The benefit
of this arrangement is that by reducing the number of
internal switch ports, the switch structure is simplified
and power consumption may potentially be reduced.
A disadvantage is that the number of ports on the
packet switch is reduced and this could reduce the
number of other packet switches in the network that it
could connect to. In some switch fabrics, such as the
TWC/AWG architecture in Fig. 2, routing of wavebands
is difficult to achieve in practice.
It is sometimes argued that optical packet switches
will consume less power than electronic packet switches
because in electronic packet switches, the data is routed
on a bit-by-bit basis, while in optical packet switches,
the data is routed on a packet-by-packet basis. A simple
model of power dissipation in the switch fabric in Fig. 5
is now developed to explore this proposition. This leads
to a better understanding of the energy consumption
of an optical packet switch fabric and the potential of
waveband routing.
The power required per wavelength in the TWC’s,
amplifiers, and FWC’s in Fig. 5 is PTWC , PAMP , and
PFWC respectively. The energy to change the state of
one optical path from the input to the output of the
switch is E SWITCH . Assuming that the gain of the
amplifiers is equal to the losses in the switch fabric and
that the quantum efficiency of the amplifiers is 100%,
then the power consumed by the amplifiers is equal
8 R.S. Tucker / Optical Switching and Networking 5 (2008) 2–9
to the optical power dissipated in losses. The power
dissipated in the losses depends on the distribution
of the gain blocks in the switch fabric and on the
total losses. If a gain block is used after every 6 dB
of loss, the number of amplifiers is L total /6, where
L total is the total loss in dB. If Pout = Pin , and
if the amplifiers have 100% quantum efficiency, it
is easy to show that the power consumed by each
amplifier is approximately 0.75Pin . Therefore, the total
power consumption all the amplifiers is approximately
PAMP = 0.75K F Pin (L total /6), where, as before, K is
the number of input wavelengths on each input fiber and
F is the number of input fibers.
Because the internal switch in Fig. 5 has to change
the state only once per packet, the energy required to
switch one complete packet through the switch is the
energy E SWITCH to change the state of one path in the
switch fabric. The energy per bit is E SWITCH divided by
the number M of wavelengths simultaneously switched
by the internal switch and divided by the number N of
bits per packet. Therefore, the total energy consumption
per bit of data E bit in the switch fabric is
Pin (L total /6) + PTWC + PFWC E SWITCH
E bit = + (1)
Brate MN
and the total power dissipation in the switch fabric is
PTOTAL = K F Brate E bit or
 the energy per bit, for a 400 Tb/s switch fabric
PTOTAL = K F Pin (L total /6) + PTWC
 based switch fabrics, for an SOA gate array, and
Brate E SWITCH
+ PFWC + . (2)
MN
Eq. (2) shows how the contribution of the switch
energy is decreased by the factor MN. To obtain a
feeling for the relative magnitude of the various terms
in (1) and (2), consider an AWG-based switch fabric
as shown in Fig. 2. We have estimated the power
consumption of a 40 Gb/s O/E/O WC to be 24 mW
for a tuneable WC and 16 mW for a fixed-tuned
WC. Therefore, with three stages of TWC’s, the power
consumption of the TWC’s is PTWC = 3 × 24 × 10−3 K
and the power consumption of one stage of FWC’s is
PFWC = 16 × 10−3 K . Similarly, we have estimated the
power consumption of O/O WC’s to be 60 mW for a
tuneable device and 53 mW for a fixed-tuned device.
For these power consumptions, PTWC = 3×60×10−3 K
and PFWC = 53×10−3 K . If Pin (L total /6) < 1 mW, and
Brate = 40 Gb/s, then (1) becomes
E SWITCH
E bit = E WC + , (3)
MN
where E WC = E TWC +E FWC = 2.1×10−12 J for O/E/O
wavelength converters, and E WC = 2.8 × 10−12 J for
O/O wavelength converters.
From (3) it is clear that the energy per bit E bit
is dominated by the wavelength converter energy
consumption E WC if E SWITCH is of the same order
of magnitude as E WC and the product MN is large.
The magnitude of E SWITCH can vary widely, depending
on the switch technology. For example, in Lithium
Niobate crosspoint switches, the electrical port is
usually terminated with a 50  load. If the switching
voltage is 3 V, the power dissipation is 180 mW, and the
switching energy per bit is this power multiplied by the
bit length (25 ps at 40 Gb/s). In this case, E SWITCH =
4.5 × 10−12 J. In switches using semiconductor optical
amplifier (SOA) gate arrays, the electrical power
consumed by a single crosspoint can be as large as 500
mW, which corresponds to E SWITCH = 12.5 × 10−12 .
For AWG-based switch fabrics, there is no electrical
switch and the second term in (3) is zero.
4. Comparison of switch fabric technologies
This section compares the power dissipation of the
switch technologies discussed in the previous sections.
The results presented here are based on an analysis
presented in [2].
Table 1 shows the total power consumption and
operating at 40 Gb/s. Data are presented for AWG-
for a CMOS switch fabric. The AWG-based switch
fabrics are subdivided into fabrics using optical (O/O)
wavelength converters, and fabrics using optoelectronic
(O/E/O) wavelength converters. The data in the column
labelled “Device Power” is the power consumption that
has been estimated for each of the WC’s in the AWG-
based cross connect and the SOA gates in the SOA gate
arrays. All other data is as given in the text. The data
in the table labelled “Energy per bit” were obtained by
counting the number of active devices and interconnects
in the structures shown in Figs. 2 and 4 for the AWG
and CMOS switch fabrics, and in a large Benes array
scaled up from the structure shown in Fig. 3. The “Total
Power” is the total poser consumption of a 10,000-port
switch fabric.
The calculated power dissipation in Table 1 for
the optical switch fabric is slightly higher than the
power dissipation in the CMOS switch fabric (2.1
kW versus 2.3 kW). The power dissipation in the
optoelectronic switch fabric (0.9 kW) is about half of
these values. This is because the energy consumption of
 R.S. Tucker / Optical Switching and Networking 5 (2008) 2–9
Table 1
Total power consumption and the energy per bit for a 400 Tb/s switch
fabric operating at 40 Gb/s
Device power Total Energy
power per bit
(kW) (pJ)
AWG-based
WC Type Tuneable Fixed
O/O 60 mW 53 mW 2.3
cross connect
O/E/O 24 mW 16 mW 0.9
SOA gate array 100 mW 26
CMOS See text 2.1
the O/E/O wavelength converters used in the modelling
is lower than the power consumption of the O/O
wavelength converters. The AWG-based switch fabric
with O/E/O wavelength converters has the lowest power
consumption and the lowest energy per bit (0.9 kW and
2.2 J/b).
The power dissipation of the SOA gate array is 26
kW which is more than an order of magnitude larger
than the other switch fabrics in Table 1. Considering this
larger power consumption and the degraded signal-to-
noise ratio at the output of the SOA gate array, SOA gate
arrays do not appear to be competitive with electronic
and AWG-based switch fabric technologies for large-
scale switch fabrics.
5. Conclusions
This paper has carried out a reality check on
the potential for optical packet switching to replace
today’s established technology that is heavily based
on electronics. The most important consideration
in this kind of comparison is energy consumption
and the associated heat dissipation problems. The
data presented here indicates that AWG-based switch
fabrics using wavelength converters potentially offer
advantages over electronic switch fabrics. However,
it is possible that optoelectronic (O/E/O) wavelength
converters will consume less energy than all-optical
(O/O) wavelength converters. Semiconductor optical
amplifier gate array switch fabrics do not appear to be
competitive with AWG-based fabrics or with electronic
switch fabrics.
It is important to note that the estimated power con-
sumption of AWG-based switch fabrics and electronic
switch fabrics presented here are quite similar. Consid-
ering the approximations made in the analysis, some
caution is needed. However, the most important con-
9
clusion that can be drawn from these results is that op-
tical packet switching with optical buffering and opti-
cal switch fabrics does not appear to provide any dra-
matic power savings when compared with electronic
packet switching. The huge challenges in optical buffer-
ing compared to electronic buffering, the lack of ultra-
wide tuning range wavelength converters, the continued
5.8 advances in CMOS and other electronic technologies,
2.2
and the lack of a clear power consumption advantage
66
5.2 in optical packet switching, all lead to the conclusion
that electronics will remain the technology of choice in
future high-capacity packet switches.
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