Wavelength-reuse in optical time-slotted networks

Abstract

An all-optical approach to achieve finer bandwidth granularity is to time division multiplex low capacity circuits on each wavelength channel and switch time–wavelength slots optically within the network. One such time-slotted network proposed in the literature is the Time Domain Wavelength Interleaved Network (TWIN), which eliminates slot switching within the network by using a non-reconfigurable core and an intelligent edge utilizing a fast tunable laser to emulate fast switching. In contrast to the TWIN, an optical time-slotted network which incorporates slot-switching within the network is the Time Wavelength Switched Network (TWSN), wherein the Time Wavelength Space Routers (TWSRs) are configured to change their routing pattern on a time-slot basis. The TWIN network assigns a unique wavelength to each node in the network and thus requires a total of W = N wavelengths for an N -node network. We call such a TWIN network as an unconstrained TWIN network. In this paper, we first provide integer linear programs and heuristic algorithms to solve the scheduling problem for a static traffic matrix (of connections) for both, the unconstrained TWIN and the TWSN networks and also compare their performances under a dynamic traffic scenario. To address the problem of scalability of the unconstrained TWIN network, we propose to design a wavelength-constrained (i.e., W < N ) TWIN network with no switching (TWIN-NS) by using a multicasting strategy. We also propose a variant of the TWIN network which possesses switching capabilities only at the edge nodes (TWIN-ES). Overall, this paper compares both versions of the TWIN networks to the TWSN network and investigates the benefits of having a reconfigurable core as opposed to a non-reconfigurable one.