Optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) Network Simulator (OWns): Architecture and Performance Studies

Optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networking technology has been identified as a suitable candidate for future wide area network (WAN) environments, due to its potential ability to meet rising demands of high bandwidth and low latency communication. Networking protocols and algorithms are being developed to meet the changing operational requirements in future optical WANs (OWAN). Simulation is used in the study and evaluation of such new protocols, and is considered a critical component of protocol design. In this paper, we present an optical WDM network simulation tool called the optical WDM network simulator (OWns), that facilitates the study of switching and routing schemes in WDM networks. OWns is designed as an extension to the network simulator ns2, a multi-protocol network simulator that is widely-used for networking research and available in the public domain. Our goal is to incorporate the key characteristics of WDM networks in the simulator, such as optical switching nodes, multi-wavelength links, virtual topology constructions, related switching schemes and routing algorithms. This paper presents the architecture and design of the simulator, and a representative performance analysis to demonstrate how the simulator can be used. The software is available at [1].