Routing and time-slot assignment in optical TDM networks

Optical time-division multiplexing (O-TDM) networks can provide a finer bandwidth granularity than wavelength-division multiplexing networks, and will play an important role in future all-optical networks. Since optical buffers are expensive, a small buffer size will be the characteristic of O-TDM systems. This paper analyzes the problem of routing and time-slot assignment in O-TDM networks. The results lead to the proposal of a Dijkstra-like shortest-path routing scheme that intends to maximize the performance of an optical network with a small number of optical buffers. Performance evaluation of the proposed scheme is also presented.