Performance of WDM rings with wavelength conversion under non-Poisson traffic

Dynamic wavelength assignment in a WDM all-optical network with sparse wavelength conversion is discussed in this paper. The performance of unidirectional and bidirectional ring networks in terms of blocking probability, conversion gain and fairness are evaluated under various types of offered traffic patterns. Smooth and peaked patterns have been considered in addition to the classical Poisson traffic type. It is shown how the use of wavelength converters affects the blocking performance of connections and, more importantly in terms of network fairness, its dependence on the source-destination distance.