Fundamental Studies on Ultra-High-Speed Optical LAN Using Optical Circuit Switching

We study the fundamental properties of the hybrid combination of optical circuit switching (OCS) and electrical packet switching (EPS) used in an ultra-high-speed local area network (LAN) of the future, where chunks of data such as those containing non-compressed super-high-definition images are frequently transmitted as well as text based data. We assume the logical topology of the OCS network in such a LAN to be single star in which the end-to-end connections are provided through a non-blocking optical matrix switch located at the center, while a conventional modest-speed EPS based network such as Ethernet is co-installed to function as another data plane as well as the control plane of the OCS network. We refer to queueing theory in order to understand the fundamental performances of OCS and packet switching, and show that the hybrid use of OCS and EPS is very preferable especially when the variance of file size is very large. Simulation results show that the hybrid configuration can significantly outperform a network based on OCS only.