A time-shift scheduling-enabled optical flow switched network architecture and its performance.

Optical flow switching (OFS) has been proposed as a simple and cost-effective transport technology for users with large transactions (>1 second). In previous studies, a fast wavelength reservation method was deployed for flow transmission in OFS-based networks. However, reserving a single wavelength for users with small transactions encounters a very common problem: inefficient wavelength utilization. In this paper, a flow transmission cycle is introduced to each wavelength, and each cycle consists of multiple slots, so that flows of different transactions can be multiplexed onto a single wavelength. It is assumed that inter-metropolitan area network (MAN) traffic is transported over wide area network (WAN). A global time-shift scheduling methodology taking into account propagation delays in MAN is designed to avoid potential contentions occurring among different flows which are carried by the same wavelength in WAN. The contributions of this paper are, first it provides a new OFS network architecture which can achieve better throughput and average wavelength utilization performance without losing the feature of simple transport structure provided by OFS; second, it is the first time that issues of how OFS networks are managed and controlled are addressed from a system point of view.