Use of delegated tuning and forwarding in wavelength division multiple access networks

Proposes delegated tuning and forwarding (DTF), a new architecture for dynamically assigning wavelength channels in a “broadcast star” optical network. DTF exploits tunable components without making excessive demands on tuner agility by combining the tuning on demand of receivers with the forwarding of packets over a logical topology. The authors describe the control algorithms of DTF and prove some results establishing their stability and robustness. They show by simulation that DTF achieves lower hop-counts in conditions of light-to-moderate load than do DeBruijn graph networks. When a DTF network is saturated, the average number of hops in each path is only about 10% higher than the average for a DeBruijn graph network, suggesting that, even under high loads, the evolution of network topology under DTF is close to optimal