Abstract
In this paper, we consider the construction of an optical priority queue with a single (M + 1) × (M + 1) switch and M fiber delay lines. The M fiber delay lines are connected from M outputs of the switch back to M inputs of the switch, leaving one input (resp. output) of the switch for the input (resp. output) of the priority queue. It was known in [8][9] that with an appropriate choice of the lengths of the delay lines, such a construction can be used for exact emulation of an optical priority queue with O(M 2 ) buffer size. In this paper, we show that the buffer size can be further extended to O(M 3 ) using the same construction. The improvement relies on establishing a partial ordering for all the packets stored in the delay lines. © 2007 IEEE.