On the capacity of optical networks: A framework for comparing different transport architectures

We compare three optical transport network architectures - optical packet switching (OPS), optical flow switching (OFS), and optical burst switching (OBS) - 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. We then apply these results to two important network topologies - bidirectional rings and Moore graphs - under uniform all-to-all traffic. Motivated by the incommensurate complexity/cost of comparable transport architectures, we also investigate the dependence of the relative capacity performance of the switching architectures on the number of switch ports per fiber at core nodes.