Impact of Physical Topology Features on Performance of Optical Backbone Networks

Physical topology is a major determinant of the system performance of optical backbone networks, and it is important to understand the relationships between physical topology features and system performance for better system design. For application in elastic optical backbone network systems, we propose a framework of correlation analysis to examine these relationships comprehensively, and we use the framework to investigate the relationships between various physical topology features and system performance. The results of numerical experiments suggest that four important physical topology features are strongly correlated with the system performance. Specifically, the average number of hops and the algebraic connectivity are strongly correlated with only the communication capacity, whereas the average path length and the geodesic distance Laplacian spectral radius are strongly correlated with both the capacity and the cost. The geodesic distance Laplacian spectral radius is a newly defined quantity that is expected to expand the possibilities of physical topology design in the future. Through combinations of these features, we classify physical topology designs and examine the relationships between the classification, real networks, and graph generation algorithms.