Probabilistic Analysis of Cyclic Packet Transmission Scheduling in WDM Optical Networks

We study the packet transmission scheduling problem with tuning delay in wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) optical communication networks with tunable transmitters and fixed-tuned receivers. By treating the numbers of packets as random variables, we conduct probabilistic analysis of the average-case performance ratio for the cyclic packet transmission scheduling algorithm. Our numerical data as well as simulation results demonstrate that the average-case performance ratio of cyclic schedules is very close to one for reasonable system configurations and probability distributions of the numbers of packets. In particular, when the number of receivers that share a channel and/or the granularity of packet transmission are large, the average-case performance ratio approaches one. Better performance can be achieved by overlapping tuning delays with packet transmission. We derive a bound for the normalized tuning delay Δ such that tuning delay can be completely masked with high probability. Our study implies that by using currently available tunable optical transceivers, it is possible to build single-hop WDM networks that efficiently utilize all the wavelengths.