Performance of the multichannel multihop lightwave network under nonuniform traffic

The effects of unbalanced traffic on the performance of the multihop network are discussed. The basic question addressed is how performance might degrade as network size increases. Because unbalanced loads can occur in a multitude of ways, two separate approaches were taken to characterize the effects of imbalance. Present results show that the allowable throughput per user for realistic load patterns is reduced by a factor between about 0.3-0.5 from that predicted for uniform load. Contrary to original fears, this deloading factor is not very sensitive to network size. Although emphasis is on the performance of the multichannel multihop network, the methods presented are applicable to other communication networks which incorporate some type of hopping. >