On the Impact of the Physical Topology on the Optical Network Performance

Network performance optimization is a poly-parametric task where usually the physical network topology is already provided and given. The latter is mainly defined by the geographical needs and the business models developed in a region that reflect the particular data traffic requirements. However, during the design of a new network, the physical topology can be considered as an additional parameter, and this work aims to study the potential impact of a network topology in the performance of the network. Two relevant metrics of optical WDM networks are evaluated, throughput and blocking ratio. Through the simulation of 350k implementations of more than 500 network topologies, we demonstrate a performance variation on networks with the same number of nodes and edges up to 73.9% on the total network load under same levels of requests blocking ratio, and up to 17.3% on the network throughput.