Virtual fully connected WDM network: architecture, scheduling and performance evaluation

With the dramatic increase of bandwidth from WDM technology, packet switching has caused a bottleneck for multi-hop networks, where electronic switches cannot scale up to high capacity while optical packet switches are still immature due to lack of optical memory. This paper proposes virtual fully connected (VFC) architecture for WDM networks to provide high performance edge-to-edge all optical transportation capability. With moderate wavelength resources, VFC architecture emulates a fully connected network by transporting traffic between edge nodes without intermediate buffering, thus a single-hop network is realized and high speed packet switches are avoided, which facilitates performance guarantee and reduces network cost. A scheduling algorithm is developed for contention resolution and bandwidth allocation, which is proved to provide 100% throughput as well as bandwidth guarantee under arbitrary traffic. Simulations show that VFC network achieves good delay performance under both uniform and non-uniform load.