On the Capacity of Optical Networks: A Framework for Comparing Different Transport Architectures

— In this work, we compare three optical transport network architectures: optical packet switching (OPS), optical flow switching (OFS), and optical burst switching (OBS). Our comparison is based on a notion of network capacity as the set of exogenous traffic rates that can be stably supported by a network under its operational constraints. We characterize the capacity regions of the transport architectures, and show that the capacity region of OPS dominates that of OFS, and that the capacity region of OFS dominates that of OBS. Motivated by the incommensurate complexity/cost of comparable transport architectures, we investigate the dependence of their relative capacity performance on the number of switch ports per fiber at core nodes. We find that when OFS and OBS core nodes have significantly many more switch ports per fiber than OPS core nodes, then the capacity regions of OFS and OBS (in the absence of receiver collisions) dominate that of OPS; and when the number of switch ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Guy Weichenberg, Vincent W. S. Chan, Muriel Médard
• Keywords: Capacity Regions, Communications, Core Nodes, INFOCOM 2006, Switch Ports