Load balancing in OCDM optical packet switched networks

Optical packet switching (OPS), which transfers the switching function from electrical domain to optical domain and provides the smallest switching granularity, is the most potential candidate of switching form in the future optical networks. Optical code division multiplexing (OCDM) is the mostly practical all-optical processing technology at the state of the art. The experiments of optical packet switching with optical code (OC) label have demonstrated the switching capability and advantages. But the timing of erasing and inserting label, which is similar with the bit-serial label processing, is the stringent requirement of this scheme. OCDM optical packet switching, which encodes the payload directly and removes the label when the payload is recovered at the decoder, has no stringent timing requirement. Multiple access interference (MAI) is the main factor degrading the performance of OCDM optical packet-switched networks. In this paper, the effects of MAI are studied at the end of optical label path where the packets experience multiple hops. For eliminating the end-to-end BER, the optical label paths need to be established in an optimum way and the load are required to be balanced. One load-balancing algorithm based on the end-to-end BER of OCDM path is proposed to improve the network performance.