Unslotted deflection routing: a practical and efficient protocol for multihop optical networks

Article dans revue scientifique avec comité de lecture.Slotted Optical Time Division Multiplexing DeAEection networks make use of the synchronous arrival of the packets to the routers in order to optimize locally the number of deflections. In this paper, it is shown that the difference of performances between slotted and unslotted networks is mainly due to the fact that unslotted network cannot directly make beneøt of such local optimization. It is also shown that, unfortuately, optimizing locally the routing in unslotted networks gives rise to an NP­complete problem. Therefore a heuristic for routing in unslotted networks is proposed. In the exprimental context considered, our heuristic enhances unslotted routing almost at the same level as slotted routing. It makes unslotted deflection routing a competitive alternaive to slotted deflection routing for OTDM networks