Packetized Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) Optical Networks

The Internet today is dominated by more and more multimedia applications such as HD videos, VoIP services and online gaming, which have driven the bandwidth demand. Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) enables hundreds of wavelength channels to be transmitted within one physical optical fiber with rates at 100Gbps per channel and beyond. This is the most promising solution to build the next generation networks. However, the all-optical DWDM network is not practical right now due to the limitations on optical technologies. On the other hand, new services such as cloud computing produce heterogeneous data traffic, which has different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements for different applications. A reconfigurable multimode switching router is positioned as a service platform to support the next generation networks in this dissertation. The reconfigurable multimode switching router can perform electronic packet switching, optical circuit switching and optical burst switching concurrently with dynamic reconfiguration capability. In this work, a mathematical model to analyze the blocking probability of the multimode router with full wavelength conversion and partial wavelength conversion is presented. The model provides an efficient way to evaluate performance of the multimode router under various traffic scenarios, and gives insights into traffic sharing and queueing in the multimode router. In order to enable packet level traffic managements in optical networks, a packetized DWDM network is proposed to provide a better QoS guarantee. A dynamical resource allocation scheme is proposed to assign bandwidth to different flows with absolute end-to-end delay guarantees. Results show the efficiency of the proposed QoS provisioning method to assign the appropriate amount of bandwidth to the traffic to meet its QoS requirements. An Open Channel multimode switching network is designed to improve the QoS support. Open channels can be established dynamically based on requests and real-time traffic conditions. A dynamic online routing scheme is applied to create open channels using the traffic information at each hop. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of the open channel approach. The-state-of-the-art research and commercial network architectures are reviewed, and the reconfigurable multimode switching router is considered as a promising service platform to support new network paradigms and services.