Maximal and effective throughput of optical switching nodes for optical burst switching

In this paper different variations of the so-called "Tune-and-Select" (TAS) switching node for Optical Burst Switching (OBS) are investigated. Both signal degradation and burst losses limit the effective throughput of such optical burst switching nodes. These limitations are analysed for different nodes with four input/output fibres at different bit rates.a The impact of amplifier noise figure, amplifier gain, output power of wavelength converters, and additional amplifiers are discussed.