Lightnet: lightpath based solutions for wide bandwidth WANs

Abstract

An inherent problem of conventional point-to-point wide area network (WAN) architectures is that they cannot translate optical transmission bandwidth into comparable user-available throughput due to the limiting electronic processing speed of the switching nodes. A solution to wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-based WAN networks that addresses this limitation is presented. The proposed lightpath architecture trades the ample bandwidth obtained by using multiple wavelengths for a reduction in the number of processing stages and a simplification of each switching stage, leading to substantially increased throughput. The principle of the lightpath architecture is the construction and use of a virtual topology network in the wavelength domain, embedded in the original network. A study is made of the embedding of virtual networks whose topologies are regular, using algorithms which provide bounds on the number of wavelengths, switch sizes, and average number of switching stages per packet transmission. >