Contribution to future metropolitan access network planning considering link failures in photonic switched networks

Photonic switching for traffic optimization in Metropolitan Access Optical Networks using technologies of optical packet/burst switching (OPS/OBS) seems to be a future-proof solution considering high capacity and the highly variable traffic in these networks. Looking for this future, we propose a study based on the analyze of survivability of traffic unconsidering protection mechanism but considering mesh and ring efficient topologies with node architecture to OPS. The results are obtained through computer modeling and simulation. The main parameters analyzed are as follows: capacity, average number of hops, packet loss fraction, and link utilization for each topology. These parameters are adopted to evaluate the performance of each topology considering failures. Minimum electronic buffering is included at node ingress (client side) to avoid packet loss in the access to the optical layer: high throughput and low latency. It is also observed that optical buffering is not necessary for adequate network performance.