Performance benchmarking of core optical networking paradigms

The sustainability of Future Internet critically depends on networking paradigms able to provide optimum and balanced performance over an extended set of efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. In this work we benchmark the most established networking modes through appropriate performance metrics for three network topologies. The results demonstrate that the static reservation of WDM channels, as used in IP/WDM schemes, is severely limiting scalability, since it cannot efficiently adapt to the dynamic traffic fluctuations that are frequently observed in today's networks. Optical Burst Switching (OBS) schemes do provide dynamic resource reservation but their performance is compromised due to high burst loss. It is shown that the CANON (Clustered Architecture for Nodes in an Optical Network) architecture exploiting statistical multiplexing over a large scale core optical network and efficient grooming at appropriate granularity levels could be a viable alternative to existing static as well as dynamic wavelength reservation schemes. Through extensive simulation results we quantify performance gains and we show that CANON demonstrates the highest efficiency achieving both targets for statistical multiplexing gains and QoS guarantees.