Performance analysis of multihop lightwave networks with hot potato routing and distance-age-priorities

Multihop lightwave networks with hot potato routing offer the potential for significantly higher aggregate capacity as compared against minimum distance routing since each interconnecting link can be operated at a rate much higher than the electro-optic constraint forced by store-and-forward buffering. If the links can be operated at a speed sufficiently high as to offset the hot potato misrouting inefficiency, then a net capacity gain will be enjoyed. In this paper, we study such a network in which contention for an outbound link is resolved by assigning to each packet a priority based on its distance to destination and its age (number of misroutes previously suffered). An approximate analysis based on a reasonable set of assumptions is presented, queueing delay, packet loss performance, and network aggregate capacity (saturation throughout) are compared for distance-age prioritization, age-distance prioritization, and no prioritization. Results suggest that the lowest delay, lowest packet loss performance, and highest saturation throughput are offered by distance-age prioritization (priority given first to a packet closest to its destination and second to the oldest of multiple packets of the same distance to destination). The tails of the probability distribution for the number of hops taken by a representative packet are, however, shorter for age-distance routing. The capacity gain with link speed-up and hot potato routing can be quite significant compared to link speed-constrained store and forward buffering, and grows with both link speed-up factor and network size