Design of OWns: Optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) Network Simulator

Optical Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) technology is a very promising candidate to harness the enormous bandwidth offered by the optical fiber. WDM networks are being actively considered for deployment in future Wide Area Network (WAN) environments such as the Next Generation Internet, in order to satisfy the high bandwidth and low latency demands. A proper performance evaluation of the different switching and routing schemes in the optical WAN (OWAN) environment is necessary to design such networks. However, a uniform simulator environment that is designed to explicitly support the features of WDM at the network layer level is currently lacking. This paper describes our efforts to provide such a simulator. The paper presents the details of the design and the ongoing implementation of Optical WDM network simulator (OWns), that could be instrumental in providing us with a foundation to facilitate routing performance study. The simulator is designed and built as an extension to the network simulator, ns2, which is being widely used for network protocol performance studies. The goal is to incorporate the concepts of multi-wavelength links, different switching schemes, and routing algorithms in the simulator. The paper concludes with discussions about the future extensions to OWns.