Performance analysis of deflection routing with virtual circuits in a Manhattan street network

We propose a new communication protocol for gigabit networks, which we call the virtual circuit deflection (abbreviated VCD) protocol, that combines some of the individual characteristics of virtual circuit switching and deflection routing. Its advantage over previous deflection routing schemes is that deflections in the VCD protocol occur on a per session basis, instead of on a per packet basis, making packet resequencing at the destination considerably easier to accomplish. The VCD protocol exploits the storage arising from the high bandwidth-delay product of optical fibers, and it provides lossless communication with minimal buffering at the switches and without the need for advance reservations. The VCD protocol appears to be particularly suitable for networks that use optical switching, where buffers are expensive to implement with current optical technology. Indeed, the VCD protocol requires only limited buffering, which can be implemented using a minimal number of optical delay lines. We analyze the performance of the VCD protocol for the MS network topology by using new analytical models