Pre-print Performance Analysis of Optical Packet-Switched Meshes: Metrics and Modeling

The surge of facilitating the ever-growing number of service classes in the contemporary Internet backbone has persuaded researches worldwide to search for suitable underlying network topolo-gies with desirable properties. Even in the presence of speedy optical technologies, the arrange-ment of nodes in a network can be highly influential in boosting network performance. Among all the topologies investigated so far, k-ary n-cubes have been reported to be widely adopted in the literature. However in a hybrid network, where the network comprises of a mixture of differ-ent types of topologies, the type and size of k-ary n-cubes can greatly influence the performance factor of the network. The objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we introduce a set of new metrics that can be used to analyze the performance behavior of simple regular meshes with their wrap-around variants (2-D and 3-D torus) for the Optical Packet Switching (OPS) paradigm. We then propose a simple and yet efficient switch-level analytical model for service differentiation in OPS in the presence of wavelength converters (WCs). The proposed model is further extended to include the impact of Fiber Delay Lines (FDLs) as well. Simulations are conducted for both cases to corroborate the accuracy of the models presented