Flow Routing and its Performance Analysis in Optical IP Networks

Optical packet-switching networks deploying buffering, wavelength conversion and multi-path routing have been extensively studied in recent years to provide high capacity transport for Internet traffic. However due to packet-based routing and switching, such a network could result in significant disorder and delay variation of packets when they are received by end users, thus increasing the burstiness of the Internet traffic and causing higher-layer protocol to malfunction. This paper addresses a novel routing and switching method for optical IP networks — flow routing, and its facilitating protocol. Flow routing deals with packet-flows to reduce flow corruption due to packet out-of-order, delay variation and packet loss, without using complicate control mechanism. Detailed performance analysis is given for output-buffered optical routers adopting flow routing. Two flow-oriented discarding techniques, i.e., flow discard (FD) and early flow discard (EFD), are discussed. Compared with optical packet-switching routers, a remarkable improvement of good-throughput is obtained in the optical flow-routers, especially under high congestion periods. We conclude that EFD behaves as a robust technique, which is more tolerant than FD to the change of traffic and transmission system factors.