Performance of shared-channel multihop lightwave networks

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Channel sharing is an attractive approach to improve the performance of multihop optical networks. It can be used to implement virtual topologies with higher connectivity, to reduce the number of hops taken by a packet and therefore, to reduce delay and increase throughput. In this paper, we study the effect of channel sharing on the performance of multihop networks when channel sharing is achieved by using a time-division multiple-access (TDMA) technique. If TDMA is used, the same wavelength channel is shared by more than one virtual link, which reduces capacities of the virtual links that share the wavelength. As a result of this, the throughput may decrease with the increase in channel sharing. We present a result which gives an upper bound on the throughput that can be achieved with any virtual topology that can be established with N stations assuming that the traffic distribution is uniform and that all virtual links have the same capacity. Using this result we determine the optimal degree of channel sharing which maximizes throughput. We also determine the optimal degree of channel sharing when the criterion is to maximize the network power, which is defined as a ratio of throughput and delay.