End-to-end performance of an optical transparent packet network

This paper investigates the overall traffic performance of a transparent optical network, suitable for high bit rate interconnection. The motivation of the introduction of such a transport network are discussed and the network architecture is presented. The performance is investigated in an end-to-end perspective. On one side the traffic resulting at the output of the interface with other networks, such as ATM for instance, is studied showing an interesting traffic shaping effect. Then this traffic is taken as the input to optical switches showing that the target performance in terms of the packet loss can be reached with present technology both in the access as well as in the core part of the network. An approximate evaluation of the end-to-end delay experienced by data crossing the optical network in a typical operating environment is given showing the effectiveness of the approach presented