The effect of increased traffic variability and wavelength capacities on ORION

To support the highly dynamic traffic patterns of the current Internet in large-scale switches efficiently, earlier work proposed a new hybrid optical network design: Overspill Routing In Optical Networks (ORION). This network concept takes advantage of the reduced (electronic) processing requirements of all-optical wavelength switched concepts, thereby relieving the electronic switching bottleneck. At the same time, ORION achieves a level of statistical multiplexing comparable to the more traditional point-to-point WDM solutions, circumventing the bandwidth inefficiencies, caused by dynamic traffic patterns, of all-optical wavelength switched networks. In this paper we demonstrate how the relative trade-offs of (standard) ORION and other technologies, wavelength switched WDM, point to point WDM and composed, change as a function of the dynamism of the applied traffic (i.e. changing burstiness). We also show the effect of increasing wavelength capacities, and thus bandwidth granularity