Combined teletraffic/transmission performance of optical cross-connected networks using hybrid-store-and-forward

Transparent multihop optical networks suffer from the accumulation, from node to node, of intraband crosstalk and amplifier spontaneous emission noise, which may severely degrade the quality of the received signals. This paper presents a hybrid semi-transparent store-and-forward (H-S&F) node architecture which minimizes the number of hops and, therefore, significantly improves the quality of the signals. Cells are electronically stored in the case of conflict to avoid deflection, otherwise cells traverse the node without opto-electronic conversion. We present the teletraffic and transmission performance of regular two-connected networks in uniform traffic. Manhattan Street (MS) network and ShuffleNet (SN) are compared both analytically and by simulation. The H-S&F performs well, in terms of throughput, transit delay and BER. It is also shown that by combining deflection routing with the store and-forward scheme the network can accommodate two different bit-rates. This suggests that the proposed hybrid scheme may have a good potential for future multimedia networks.