On the Performance of Optical Flow Routers Employing Wavelength Conversion

In optical flow-routing networks, packet flows are transmitted through optical flow routers. Featuring the increased good-throughput, optical flow routers have been proposed as a substitute to optical packet routers for the future optical Internet. This paper studies the optical flow routers using wavelength conversion and optical buffering as the contention resolution. A detailed analysis employing Markov process is provided in order to investigate the performance of optical flow routers and to compare with optical packet routers. Results show that wavelength conversion is a promising technique in improving the optical flow routers’ performance. Up to 99% good-throughput can be achieved in an optical flow router with 10 wavelength conversions and 60 buffers under a traffic load per wavelength of 2. On the other hand our results suggest that the good-throughput of optical packet routers cannot be improved by wavelength conversion.