Design of virtual optical bus networks: A heuristic approach

We study the design of virtual optical bus (VOB) network, which has been recently proposed as a packet-oriented all-optical solution for transport networks. Design of a VOB network consists of grouping all edge-to-edge flows in the network into clusters called VOBs and that has to be done with the objective of minimizing packet collision rate in the optical network. We present an efficient heuristic algorithm, which can be utilized in networks with both ring and arbitrary meshed topology to find near optimal solutions to the VOB network design problem. Several design examples are presented and the results are compared to those obtained by applying a linear-programming-based design method. The comparisons show that the algorithm can find comparable solutions-in terms of network performance-in a much less amount of time.