Performance analysis and dimensioning of multi-granular optical networks

Recent years have demonstrated the limited scalability of electronic switching to realize transport networks. In response, all-optical switching has been identified as a candidate solution to enable high-capacity networking in the future. One of the fundamental challenges is to efficiently support a wide range of traffic patterns, and thus emerges the need for equipment that is both practical and economical to construct and deploy. We have previously proposed the use of multi-granular optical cross-connects (MG-OXC), which support switching on both the wavelength and sub-wavelength level. To this end, the MG-OXCs are equipped with cheap, highly scalable slow switching fabrics, as well as a small number of expensive fast switching ports. The goal of this work is two-fold: first to demonstrate that a small number of fast switching ports suffice to support a wide range of traffic requirements, and second that multi-granular optical switching can offer cost-benefits on a network-wide scale. The first objective is studied through simulation analysis of a single switching node, and results indicate that a limited number of fast switching ports can significantly improve burst blocking performance over slow only switches. Furthermore, under certain circumstances, the MG-OXC can even approach the performance of a fast only switch design. Secondly, we introduce an Integer Linear Programming model for the total network installation cost, and our evaluation indicates that multi-granular optical switching can be a cost-effective solution on the network level, in comparison to slow only or fast only approaches. Furthermore, we can achieve reduced costs of individual OXC nodes, which allows us to minimize scalability problems corresponding to emerging fast switching fabrics.