Optical packet switching is a prominent technology proposing not only a reduction in the energy consumption by the elimination of numerous optical–electrical–optical conversions in electronic switches, but also a decrease in network latencies due to the cut-through nature of packet transmission. However, it is adversely affected by packet contention, preventing its deployment. Solutions have been proposed to tackle the problem: addition of shared electronic buffers to optical switches (then called hybrid opto-electronic switches), customization of TCP protocols, and use of different service classes of packets with distinct switching criteria. In the context of data center networks, we investigate a combination of said solutions and show that the hybrid switch, compared to the optical switch, boosts the performance of the data center network. Furthermore, we show that introducing a “Reliable” service class improves performance for this class not only in the case of the hybrid switch, but also brings the optical switch to performance levels comparable to that of the hybrid switch, all the while keeping other classes’ performance on the same level.

光分组交换是一项杰出的技术，不仅提出了通过消除电子交换机中大量的光-电-光转换来降低能耗的方法，而且还由于分组传输的直通特性而降低了网络延迟。但是，它会受到数据包争用的不利影响，从而阻止其部署。已经提出了解决该问题的解决方案：向光学交换机（然后称为混合光电交换机）添加共享的电子缓冲区，定制TCP协议以及使用具有不同交换标准的分组的不同服务类别。在数据中心网络中，我们研究了上述解决方案的组合，并表明与光交换相比，混合交换机提高了数据中心网络的性能。