Performance analysis of multihop lightwave networks with hot potato routing and distance-age-priorities

A network is studied in which contention for an outbound link is resolved by assigning to each packet a priority based on its distance to destination and its age (number of misroutes previously suffered). Queueing delay, lost packet performance and network aggregate capacity (saturation throughput) are compared for distance-age prioritization, age-distance prioritization and no prioritization. Results suggest that the lower delay, lower lost packet performance, and high saturation throughputs are offered by distance prioritization. The tails of the probability distribution for the number of hops taken by a representative packet are, however, shorter for age-distance routing. Typical results show that, for a multihop shuffle network with 10240 nodes, the saturation throughput is about 40% higher for distance-age prioritization. For a smaller network with 384 nodes, the improvement falls to 25%