Abstract
It has been studied extensively in the literature how one achieves exact emulation of First InFirst Out (FIFO) multiplexers for xed size cells (or packets) using optical crossbar Switchesand ber Delay Lines (SDL). In this thesis, we take a step further and propose a newarchitecture that achieves exact emulation of FIFO multiplexers for variable length bursts.Our architecture consists of two blocks: a cell scheduling block and an FIFO multiplexerfor xed size cells. Both blocks are made of SDL units. The objective of the cell schedulingblock is to schedule cells in a burst to the right input at the right time so that cells in thesame burst depart contiguously from the multiplexer for xed size cells. We show that cellscheduling can be done eAciently by keeping track of a single state variable, called the totalvirtual waiting time in this thesis. Moreover, the delay through the cell scheduling block isbounded above by a constant that only depends on the number of inputs and the maximumnumber of cells in a burst. Such a delay bound provides a limit on the number of ber delaylines needed in the cell scheduling block.