Performance tradeoffs of shared limited range wavelength conversion schemes in optical WDM networks

Performance of all-optical switches that employee different types of limited-range wavelength converters (LRWC) are investigated. Previous work has shown that there is a remarkable improvement in blocking probability while using LRWC over full range conversion, but has not considered the coincident effect of conversion resources sharing. We consider the case where an incoming wavelength can be converted to a range of outgoing wavelengths, where d is the range of conversion. The simulation results demonstrate that the performance improvement obtained by full range wavelength conversion can almost be achieved by using a fractional ranged LRWC.