All-optical LAN interconnection with a wavelength selective router

This paper formulates the wavelength assignment issues an interconnecting optical broadcast-star local area networks (LANs) through a wavelength routing bridge. Static and dynamic approaches to partitioning of wavelengths for local and global traffic are compared using analysis and simulations. It is found that static wavelength assignment, the easiest algorithm to implement, is significantly outperformed by dynamic algorithms. Several dynamic assignment algorithms are developed, and architectural issues in interconnecting optical networks are discussed. The dependence of the call blocking performance on system parameters, such as the traffic rate, the local and global traffic statistics, and the number of available wavelengths is examined in detail. A simple, yet accurate approximation is also developed to predict the blocking performance with an arbitrary number of LANs.