Proposal and Evaluation of Photonic Switching Architectures for High-Capacity Optical Access Networks

Considering that optical packet/burst switching (OPS/OBS) are considered strong candidates for metropolitan networks in the near future, this work is a contribution evaluating the performance of some network models based on OPS/OBS mesh/ring architectures. We use both the conventional models of ring and mesh (Manhattan Street type), and slightly modified models implementing new structures, with cases of unidirectional and of bi-directional links. Our main goal here is to find through computer simulations the better architectures, in terms of (higher) capacity and (lower) latency. We choose the parameters average number of hops, total number of deflections and packet loss fraction as metrics for network performance. We observe that networks with best performance are the ones with largest number of different paths between nodes.