Performance and Power Consumption Analysis of a Hybrid Optical Core Node

Hybrid optical switching (HOS) is a switching paradigm that aims to combine optical circuit switching, optical burst switching, and optical packet switching on the same network. This paper proposes a novel integrated control plane for an HOS core node. The control plane makes use of a unified control packet able to carry the control information for all the different data formats and employs an appropriate scheduling algorithm for each incoming data type. Three possible node architectures are presented and an analytical model is introduced to analyze their power consumption. Also, the concept of increase in power efficiency is introduced to compare the considered architectures. The performance and power consumption analysis of the node have been carried out through the use of a simulation model developed specifically for the scope. The obtained results show the effectiveness of HOS networks.