Transmitter and receiver contention in Optical Flow Switching networks

Offering end-to-end optical circuit switching has the advantage of carrying a large fraction of the overall network traffic using relatively low-cost and low-power optical equipment, when compared to IP routers. For an end-to-end circuit to be successfully established, the following conditions must be simultaneously met: a transmitter must be available at the sender, a receiver must be available at the destination, and a wavelength channel must be available across the network in order to connect the sender to the destination. The contribution of this paper is twofold. An admission control engine is proposed to efficiently handle transmitter- and receiver-contention in Optical Flow Switching (OFS) networks. Then, an analytical framework is derived to estimate network throughput and latency while taking into account both types of contention.