Design and analysis of a conceptual wavelength-division multiplexing optical network based on self-similarity

Abstract

We propose a novel multilevel wavelength-division multiplexing optical network based on the concept of self-similarity to simplify network structure and operation. Our approach lies on a simple network topology as well as an efficient wavelength management scheme being uniformly applied to all network levels. The proposed network is a compound packet-switched and wavelength-routed network with packet switching performed on the bottom level and wavelength routing on all upper levels. This network retains the efficiency of packet-switched networks and the simplicity of wavelength-routed networks. Switching operations are concentrated at some special nodes in the multilevel network, significantly simplifying the node configuration and wavelength routing. Moreover, the idea of X bands is applied to unify wavelength management on all network levels. Network analysis is performed to assess the feasibility of our approach. A queueing model using the quality of service enhanced optical burst switching protocol is employed to analyze the blocking performance of the proposed network. Also, the numerical results based on the queueing model are provided. (C) 2010 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [DOI: 10.1117/1.3309456]