Unslotted deflection routing: a practical and efficient protocol for multihop optical networks

This paper is concerned with all-optical networks using deflection routing and time division multiplexing. Slotted networks make use of the synchronous arrival of the packets to the routers to minimize locally the number of deflections. We show that the difference in performance between slotted and unslotted networks is mainly due to the fact that unslotted networks cannot easily perform such local optimization. We also show that minimizing locally the number of deflections in unslotted networks gives rise to an NP-complete problem. To overcome this problem, we have designed a heuristic whose aim is to limit locally the number of deflections. We experimentally demonstrate that this heuristic enhances unslotted routing almost at the same performance level as slotted routing. As a consequence, we have shown that unslotted deflection routing can be implemented is a way which makes it a competitive alternative to slotted deflection routing for optical time division multiplexing deflection networks