The overhead associated with reconfiguring a switch fabric in optical packet switches is an important issue in relation to the packet transmission time and can adversely affect switch performance. The reconfiguration overhead increases the mean waiting time of packets and reduces throughput. The scheduling of packets must take into account the reconfiguration frequency. This work proposes an analytical model for input-buffered optical packet switches with the reconfiguration overhead and analytically finds the optimal reconfiguration frequency that minimizes the mean waiting time of packets. The analytical model is suitable for several round-robin (RR) scheduling schemes in which only non-empty virtual output queues (VOQs) are served or all VOQs are served and is used to examine the effects of the RR scheduling schemes and various network parameters on the mean waiting time of packets. Quantitative examples demonstrate that properly balancing the reconfiguration frequency can effectively reduce the mean waiting time of packets
