Hypercube connected rings: a fault-tolerant and scalable architecture for virtual lightwave network topology

A new, fault-tolerant, scalable, and modular virtual topology for lightwave networks employing wavelength division multiplexing is proposed. The proposed architecture is based on a hypercube connected ring structure that enjoys the rich topological properties of a hypercube, but it also overcomes one of its drawbacks. In a hypercube, the nodal degree increases with the number of nodes. Hence, the per-node cost of the network increase as the network size grows. However, in a hypercube connected ring network (HCRNet) the nodal degree is small and it remains constant, independent of the network population. The HCRNet, like the hypercube, is perfectly symmetric in the sense that average internodal distance in an N-node HCRNet is the same from any source node. Its average internodal distance is in the order of logN and it is comparable to other regular structures such as Trous and ShuffleNet. The authors present the structural properties of the HCRNet and the network routing