Multihop lightwave networks: a comparison of store-and-forward and hot-potato routing

The achievable aggregate capacity for a variant of the basic multihop approach in which minimum distance store-and-forward routing is replaced by a hot-potato routing algorithm is determined. With hot-potato routing, all packets simultaneously arriving at a given node and not intended for reception at that node are immediately placed onto the outbound links leaving that node; if two or more packets contend for the same outgoing link to achieve a minimum distance routing, then all but one will be misrouted to links which produce longer paths to the eventual destination. Attention is confined to the development of an analytical methodology for finding the probability distribution of the number of hops with hot potato routing for symmetric networks under uniform traffic load. Results show that the maximum throughput achievable with hot-potato routing can be as low as 25% of that for store-and-forward routing, and that the relative degradation increases as the number of nodes grows larger. This implies that the link speed up needed to produce a significant overall capacity advantage with hot potato should be at least a factor of 10