The value of optical bypass in reducing router size in gigabit networks

With the expected explosive growth in data traffic, the required processing demands at network nodes, e.g., in routers, will likely present a significant bottleneck. Optical bypass potentially alleviates this bottleneck by allowing a wavelength to bypass a node if it contains no traffic that needs to be processed there. We explore the value of optical bypass in gigabit networks by measuring the fractional decrease in required router size one can expect. We consider both ring and mesh topologies, and both uniform and distance-dependent traffic. We show that the reduction in router size can be very significant, with the fractional savings increasing as the size of the network increases and the amount of traffic increases, indicating that this technique will scale well in future networks.