Analysis of hot-potato optical networks with wavelength conversion

Wavelength conversion has been shown to reduce the probability of blocking in both circuit-switching and pa.cket-switching wavelength routed optical networks (WRONs). The effectiveness of the blocking reduction depends on the topology, and is known to be best for meshed topologies, where the average number of hops per path is large. This paper shows that by exploiting wavelength conversion, routing without buffers, known as hot-potato, becomes an interesting option for packet switching WRONs with meshed topologies, such as Manhattan Street (MS) Network and ShuffleNet (SN). The results show that, by using more than 4 wavelengths, a 64 node MS or SN network can work at full load with a hop delay within one hop from its lowest achievable value. We also show that using delay-line routing buffers at the node is a much more effective way of reducing blocking than using wavelength conversion.