Distributed storage scenario in a wide area WDM mesh architecture under heterogeneous traffic

This paper proposes a distributed storage scenario in a wide area wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) mesh architecture. A number of storage area network (SAN) nodes are introduced to the architecture. Each SAN node serves as a primary SAN for some nodes and as a secondary SAN for others, depending on the node location. Distributing storage over different nodes helps balancing traffic flows between nodes compared to centralized storage scenarios where all SAN traffic flows originate from and are distanced to a single SAN node. SAN traffic is assumed to co-exist with IP and/or 10GE traffic to achieve economy of scale. A hybrid optical switching (HOS) technique is considered in which both optical circuit switching (OCS) and optical burst switching (OBS) are used as the transmission mechanism. OCS is used for IP/10GE traffic transmission and OBS is used for SAN traffic transmission. A network simulator is developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture using accurate traffic sources.