Optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing ( WDM ) Network Simulator ( OWns ) : Architecture and Performance Studies

Optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networking technology has been identified as a suitable candidate for future wide area network (WAN) environments, due to its potential ability to meet rising demands of high bandwidth and low latency communication. Networking protocols and algorithms are being developed to meet the changing operational requirements in future optical WANs (OWAN). Simulation is used in the study and evaluation of such new protocols, and is considered a critical component of protocol design. In this paper, we present an optical WDM network simulation tool called the optical WDM network simulator (OWns), that facilitates the study of switching and routing schemes in WDM networks. OWns is designed as an extension to the network simulator ns2, a multi-protocol network simulator that is widely-used for networking research and available in the public domain. Our goal is to incorporate the key characteristics of WDM networks in the simulator, such as optical switching nodes, multi-wavelength links, virtual topology constructions, related switching schemes and routing algorithms. This paper presents the architecture and design of the simulator, and a representative performance analysis to demonstrate how the simulator can be used. The software is available at [1].

[1]  Murat Yuksel,et al.  Workload Generation for ns Simulations of Wide Area Networks and the Internet , 2000 .

[2]  P. Green,et al.  Progress in optical networking , 2001, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[3]  QiaoChunming,et al.  Optical burst switching (OBS) - a new paradigm for an optical Internet , 1999 .

[4]  Byrav Ramamurthy,et al.  SIMON: a simulator for optical networks , 1999, Optics East.

[5]  Jennifer Yates,et al.  Limited-range wavelength translation in all-optical networks , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '96. Conference on Computer Communications.

[6]  David Wetherall,et al.  Extending Tcl for Dynamic Object-Oriented Programming , 1995, Tcl/Tk Workshop.

[7]  Imrich Chlamtac,et al.  Lightpath communications: an approach to high bandwidth optical WAN's , 1992, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[8]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  Enabling large-scale simulations: selective abstraction approach to the study of multicast protocols , 1998, Proceedings. Sixth International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (Cat. No.98TB100247).

[9]  Suresh Subramaniam,et al.  All-optical networks with sparse wavelength conversion , 1996, TNET.

[10]  Biswanath Mukherjee,et al.  Advances in photonic packet switching: an overview , 2000, IEEE Commun. Mag..