Wavelength conversion in optical packet switching

A detailed traffic analysis of optical packet switch design is performed. Special consideration is given to the complexity of the optical buffering and the overall switch block structure is considered in general. Wavelength converters are shown to improve the traffic performance of the switch blocks for both random and bursty traffic. Furthermore, the traffic performance of switch blocks with add--drop sports has been assessed in a Shufflenetwork showing the advantage of having converters at the inlets. Finally, the aspect of synchronization is discussed through a proposal to operate the packet switch block asynchronously, i.e., without packet alignment at the input

Efficient embedding of virtual hypercubes in irregular WDM optical networks

This thesis addresses one of the important issues in designing future WDM optical networks. Such networks are expected to employ an all-optical control plane for dissemination of network state information. It has recently been suggested that an efficient control plane will require non-blocking communication infrastructure and routing techniques. However, the irregular nature of most WDM networks does not lend itself to efficient non-blocking communications. It has been recently shown that hypercubes offer some very efficient non-blocking solutions for, all-to-all broadcast operations, which would be very attractive for control plane implementation. Such results can be utilized by embedding virtual structures in the physical network and doing the routing using properties of a virtual architecture. We will emphasize the hypercube due to its proven usefulness. In this thesis we propose three efficient heuristic methods for embedding a virtual hypercube in an irregular host network such that each node in the host network is either a hypercube node or a neighbor of a hypercube node. The latter will be called a “satellite” or “secondary” node. These schemes follow a step-by-step procedure for the embedding and for finding the physical path implementation of the virtual links while attempting to optimize certain metrics such as the number of wavelengths on each link and the average length of virtual link mappings. We have designed software that takes the adjacency list of an irregular topology as input and provides the adjacency list of a hypercube embedded in the original network. We executed this software on a number of irregular networks with different connectivities and compared the behavior of each of the three algorithms. The algorithms are compared with respect to their performance in trying to optimize several metrics. We also compare our algorithms to an already existing algorithm in the literature

Topology Control and Pointing in Free Space Optical Networks

Free space optical (FSO) communication provides functionalities that are different from fiber optic networks and omnidirectional RF wireless communications in that FSO is optical wireless (no infrastructure installation cost involving fibers) and is highly directional (no frequency interference). Moreover, its high-speed data transmission capability is an attractive solution to the first or last mile problem to bridge to current fiber optic network and is a preferable alternative to the low data rate directional point-to-point RF communications for inter-building wireless local area networks. FSO networking depends critically on pointing, acquisition and tracking techniques for rapidly and precisely establishing and maintaining optical wireless links between network nodes (physical reconfiguration), and uses topology reconfiguration algorithms for optimizing network performance in terms of network cost and congestion (logical reconfiguration). The physical and logical reconfiguration process is called Topology Control and can allow FSO networks to offer quality of service by quickly responding to various traffic demands of network users and by efficiently managing network connectivity. The overall objective of this thesis research is to develop a methodology for self-organized pointing along with the associated autonomous and precise pointing technique as well as heuristic optimization methods for Topology Control in bi-connected FSO ring networks, in which each network node has two FSO transceivers. This research provides a unique, autonomous, and precise pointing method using GPS and local angular sensors, which is applicable to both mobile and static nodes in FSO networking and directional point-to-point RF communications with precise tracking. Through medium (264 meter) and short (40 meter) range pointing experiments using an outdoor testbed on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, sub-milliradian pointing accuracy is presented. In addition, this research develops fast and accurate heuristic methods for autonomous logical reconfiguration of bi-connected ring network topologies as well as a formal optimality gap measure tested on an extensive set of problems. The heuristics are polynomial time algorithms for a congestion minimization problem at the network layer and for a multiobjective stochastic optimization of network cost and congestion at both the physical and network layers

IP multicast over WDM networks

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH