Performance analysis of realistic optical time division multiplexed wavelength-routed networks

Abstract — Application of optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) in wavelength routed optical networks will greatly en-hance the flexibility of bandwidth assignment because OTDM pro-vides time division sub-channels in a wavelength to match the processing speed of electronic devices. Different types of such OTDM wavelength-routed (OTDM-WR) networks assuming dif-ferent level of sophistication of the OTDM technology have been proposed. The performance of these OTDM-WR networks im-proves with the time-slot routing capability of the intermediate nodes of the network. However, as the transmission rate increases up to hundreds of gigabits per wavelength channel, electronic pro-cessing of the time slots limit the achievable performance of the OTDM-WR networks. All-optical signal processing can overcome the electronics bottleneck but available all-optical signal process-ing capability is rather limited and cannot utilize the full poten-tial of time-slot routing; for example, all-optical time slot inter-change is not practical yet. Even with such limitations, current technologies such as fast wavelength converters and micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) optical switches can significantly en-hance the performance of existing wavelength-routed networks by adding the OTDM capability, albeit limited. In this paper, we de-velop time-slot routing schemes that requires fast wavelength con-verters only and study the performance of these schemes by sim-ulations on Manhattan street networks and a network of topology of AT&T North America OC-48 fiber network. I