Reducing Loss Rate in Slotted Optical Networks: A Lower Bound Analysis

Optical time division multiplexing can be deployed in an all-optical network to provide a finer granularity and improve the bandwidth usage. In contention-based slotted all-optical networks, transmitted traffic (referred to as slot in this paper) on the same wavelength and time-slot from different ingress switches may collide at the optical switches and therefore a number of slots will be lost. In this paper, we study various software techniques to reduce the slot loss rate at an optical switch. We prove some lemmas related to the contention avoidance issue. We show that the ingress switches can have an important role in the loss rate reduction issue in the slotted all-optical networks by balancing the traffic on the wavelength channels and the symmetric traffic transmission. We analyze for the first time the lower-bound on the slot loss rate. We show how to achieve the lower-bound on the loss rate in practice.