A Simulation Study of Combined Routing and Contention Resolution Algorithms in Connection-Oriented OPS Network Scenario

Connection-oriented optical packet-switched network integrates MPLS and OPS layers to exploit the best of electronic and optical technologies. In particular, routing components use enhanced routing algorithms to compute the paths; forwarding components examine the labels of incoming packets to determine the next hop and contention resolution algorithms to solve packets contention; finally packets are physically transferred to the output interface, properly chosen by the forwarding component, using optics. In this paper we describe the details of such a network scenario, identifying some problems and suggesting different routing and contention resolution algorithms. The resulting network is evaluated by simulation in order to obtain network performance characteristics for suitable combined selection of these algorithms