Traffic Aggregation in Hybrid Ring-Star Optical Networks

The increasing demand of future Internet traffic requires optical traffic grooming technology to reduce the complexity of the network. A network with optical cross connects and fibers has been considered as one potential architecture to achieve this goal. The design of this type of architecture involves determining the number of network components and the interconnection topology. In this paper we show that a hybrid ring-star topology and waveband grooming can help to reduce the network complexity. This helps us to minimize the number of nodes, and the number of ports required in each node. We develop an analytical method for the design of hybrid ring-star topology to reduce the capital cost of the overall optical network. We evaluate the performance of our method in terms of the number of network elements required for a national backbone network.