Blocking models of optical burst switches with shared wavelength converters: exact formulations and analytical approximations

Loss modeling of asynchronous optical burst switches with shared wavelength converters is considered. An exact analysis based on continuous time markov chains is proposed and validated by comparison with simulation for balanced and unbalanced traffic. A computationally efficient approximated analysis is also proposed and compared with the exact model to find applicability conditions. Approximate loss performance evaluation is presented for ranges of values which are not tractable either by simulation or exact analysis