Scheduling in Optical WDM Networks Using Hidden Markov Chain Based Traffic Prediction

This paper presents the design and performance analysis of a predictor-based scheduling algorithm for optical wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) networks. WDM technology provides multiple, simultaneous and independent gigabit-per-second channels on a single fiber. A reservation-based multiple access control (MAC) protocol is considered here for a local area WDM network based on the passive star topology. The MAC protocol schedules reservation requests from the network nodes on the multiple channels. In previous work, we have presented an on-line scheduling algorithm for such a network. We have shown earlier that schedule computation time can significantly affect performance and the scheduling algorithms should be simple for better performance. In this work, we further improve system performance by using a hidden Markov chain based prediction algorithm. The objective here is to reduce the amount of time spent in computing the schedule by predicting traffic requests. Performance analysis based on discrete-event simulation, varying parameters such as number of nodes and channels is presented. The results show that the error of prediction is reasonable for most cases: more than 70% of the time, the error between actual request and predicted request is less than 20%. Network throughput is higher with the proposed prediction algorithm due to pipelining of schedule computation.