Dynamic resource allocation with service guarantees over large scale optical networks

The lack of effective contention resolution mechanisms in the optical domain presents dynamic optical switching architectures with a hard dilemma between high loss (when adopting one-way reservations) and high delay (when using two-way reservations). In this work we evaluate an alternative hierarchical network architecture, which achieves a satisfactory compromise by partitioning the network into a number of geographically limited domains operating in slot and frame synchronous mode where two-way reservations are effective.