OPN01-5: Cost-Efficient Physical Architecture for OXC-switched WDM Mesh Networks - Generalized Moore Graphs and Their Close Relatives

In this work, we provide analytical insights into physical architectures that can serve as benchmarks for designing cost-efficient WDM metropolitan area networks (MANs). For analytical simplicity, we restrict our attention to uniform all-to-all traffic and regular topologies with nodal symmetry. By formulating a first-order cost model and characterizing the tradeoff between fiber and switching resources, we identify a class of regular graphs - generalized Moore graphs - that have attractive properties for MAN designs. Our previous and new results show that, in conjunction with minimum hop routing (which is shown to be optimal), Moore Graphs (special cases of Generalized Moore Graphs) achieve the minimum cost and simultaneously use the least number of wavelengths. We also broaden the scope of our work by addressing irregular network topologies, which represent most existing networks. We show that our results on networks that are generalized Moore networks can be used to provide useful estimates of the cost of irregular networks. These properties indicate that generalized Moore graphs and their close relatives are good reference architectures for the designs of practical networks.