Performance Analysis of Optical Circuit Switched Networks

Abstract

Optical Circuit Switching is one of the all-optical switching schemes for Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM), which is of renewed importance amid the increasing bandwidth need nowadays. For the backbone of the Internet where the traffic is heavy, great utilisation can be achieved using OCS with the minimum overhead. The widely used circuit switching demands more studies in the context of future optical networks, in order to fulfil various QoS (Quality of Service) and cost requirements. This project studies the performance of OCS under different configurations, by the way of both mathematical analyses and computer simulations. Particularly, careful investigation has been conducted from vanilla OCS to alternate routing, trunk reservation, and prioritised classes of connections. Analysis is applied to network of different sizes like ring network and NSF network. Numeric models and simulation tools are implemented in Java to evaluate the performance of OCS under various system parameters.