A study on hybrid optical network architecture with OCDM technology

Optical circuit switching (OCS) technology is mostly used in all-optical network. Most OCS networks use WDM on fibers and one wavelength is assigned to one connection. However, OCS technology needs to pre-configure a lightpath before transmitting data, and the pre-configuring overhead takes more than round trip time between the source node and destination node. This pre-configuring overhead also exists when we set up optical CDM paths on a wavelength of a WDM network. Therefore, when the data size is small, the influence of the pre-configuring overhead becomes large relatively. In this paper, we propose a hybrid optical network architecture and a control method to reduce this influence. Our hybrid architecture includes a broadcast network in addition to an OCS network, an all traffic is transferred on the selected network according to the traffic characteristics. We evaluate the basic performance of the OCS network and the broadcast network and show that the broadcast network can transfer data more efficiently than the OCS network when the data size is small.