Optimal dimensioning of the WDM unidirectional ECOFRAME optical packet ring

• Published in: Photonic network communications Vol. 22; no. 3; pp. 254 - 265
• Main Authors: Ušćumlić, Bogdan, Cerutti, Isabella, Gravey, Annie, Gravey, Philippe, Barth, Dominique, Morvan, Michel, Castoldi, Piero
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01-12-2011; Springer Verlag
• Subjects: Characterization and Evaluation of Materials; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Electrical Engineering; Engineering Sciences; Mathematics; Networking and Internet Architecture; Optics; Photonic; Probability; Network dimensioning; Optical packet switching; WDM ring
• ISSN: 1387-974X; 1572-8188
• DOI: 10.1007/s11107-011-0325-z

To efficiently support the high rate and the high dynamicity of the traffic in metro networks, an optical packet-switched WDM ring, named ECOFRAME, is proposed. The key features of the proposed ring are optical transparency and statistical multiplexing of optical packets on parallel WDM channels. Such features can be exploited by properly allocating wavelengths and receivers. This paper aims to optimally dimension the unidirectional ECOFRAME rings. The dimensioning at minimum cost (i.e., for wavelengths and receivers) is modeled with an mixed-integer linear programming formulation. An heuristic algorithm is also proposed, and its performance is compared against the optimal solutions and bounds. When considering the receiver and wavelength cost, results indicate that trading the wavelengths for receivers allows cost saving of up to 75% with respect to WDM optical packet rings with a single dedicated wavelength per node (i.e., single receiver at each node).