Minimizing the Number of Wavelength Converters in Optical Burst-Switched Networks

The prospects of optical burst switching (OBS) as a cost-effective switching paradigm for future all-optical transport networks would greatly benefit from minimizing the number of wavelength converters required at the network nodes. This paper presents a wavelength assignment framework tailored for OBS networks with shared wavelength converters directed to reach this aim. Simulation results using a reference network show that the performance attained with full-range dedicated wavelength converters can be achieved with less than half the number of these converters if shared converters are used instead. Moreover, it is shown that the number of converters can be further decreased by employing the proposed wavelength assignment framework. The extent of this decrease depends on the offered traffic load and the number of wavelengths per link.