Even Slot Transmission in Slotted Optical Packet-Switched Networks

The issue of transmitting optical packets (called slots in this paper) smoothly toward an egress switch appears to be overlooked in bandwidth access schemes proposed for optical packet-switched (OPS) networks. Here, we explain the benefits of providing an even (smooth) slot transmission and propose four basic metrics and three hybrid metrics to achieve an even slot transmission from an ingress switch of a multiwavelength/fiber slotted OPS network. The even slot transmission can help improve network performance parameters required for Internet applications. An index parameter is also introduced for each method, and a formulation is provided to gauge how even a transmission is among different combinations of frame periods, wavelengths, and fibers. These formulations can provide us with a new approach to relatively compare different bandwidth access schemes in order to determine which scheme can provide an even transmission of traffic to an OPS network. An example is provided for the comparison of two existing bandwidth access schemes in terms of even transmission of traffic.