Multicast contention resolution based on time-frequency joint scheduling in elastic optical switching networks

Resolving the optical multicast contention in optical switch node is an effective approach to improve the performance of elastic optical multicast switch. An optical node architecture integrating with output shared all-optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) network coding technology and shared feedback fiber delay lines (FDLs) buffer is designed. And a time-frequency joint scheduling strategy (TFJSS) is proposed. In TFJSS, the maximal weighted independent set algorithm is used to select the output packets with no overlapping spectrum among the contending multicast packets. The remaining contention packets are compressed by OFDM network coding with all-optical XOR operation. Hence, the contention is avoided in spectrum domain by encoding the contending unicast/multicast packets and changing the carrier frequency of encoded packets. If the network coding cannot successfully resolve the contending packets, the shared feedback FDLs are called to address the contention in time domain. Compared with the existing node architecture and scheduling algorithm, the simulation results show that the proposed architecture and the TFJSS can reduce the packet loss probability with low delay largely.