On the performance of wavelength division multiple access networks

The authors present a mathematical model which approximates wavelength division multiple access (WDMA) networks with general hardware configurations and arbitrary traffic patterns. They study the case of a uniform traffic matrix and observe that, when the number of wavelengths is fewer than the number of stations, it is better to have both tunable transmitters and tunable receivers, rather than having only one of them tunable. Only a small number of tunable transmitters and receivers per station is needed to produce performance close to the upper bound. A general traffic model is constructed and an iterative solution procedure is proposed. A case of hot-spot traffic is studied by using this model. It is found that adding more resources to the hot-spot node will help improve its performance, but only to a limited extent determined by the traffic imbalance. The match between the model and simulation results is shown to be excellent