Routing, switching, and multiaccess in all-optical networks

All-optical networks are expected to play an integral role in the architecture envisioned for the future telecommunications infrastructure. In this dissertation, we study the implications of optical device technology on the design and analysis of circuit-switched and packet-switched all-optical networks.;First, we consider the problem of routing and wavelength assignment in wide-area all-optical wavelength-routing networks supporting circuit-switching. We propose a class of adaptive algorithms that incorporate the network state in making a joint route selection and wavelength assignment decision. We evaluate the blocking performance as well as the complexity of these algorithms and demonstrate that they outperform traditional routing and wavelength assignment algorithms. We present an accurate analytical method to compute blocking probabilities for a class of popular routing and wavelength assignment algorithms. We also study networks with multiple fibers per link, and demonstrate dramatic performance improvements over networks that use one fiber per link.;While wavelength-routing networks are expected to be deployed in the wide area as backbone networks, broadcast-and-select networks are suitable for the role of ultra high speed local area networks. The current wavelength resolution capabilities of optical technology does not provide as many usable wavelengths as there are nodes. We study the effects of this bandwidth limitation on the performance of packet-switched all-optical local area networks supporting a mix of multicast and unicast traffic. We obtain analytical expressions for the maximum supportable throughput and average packet delays as a function of the bandwidth limitation and input traffic. The results indicate that it is sufficient to have a wavelength-to-user ratio of 0.4-0.6 to obtain most of the benefits associated with wavelength division multiplexing. We also study the benefits of using multiple receivers per node and demonstrate significant performance gains over the single receiver case.;Finally, we investigate the impact of tuning delays of optical devices on the performance of WDM packet-switched networks. We propose a new multiple access scheme which combines the desired properties of wavelength division and code division multiple access to alleviate the effect of tuning delays on network performance. Using a queueing-theoretic framework, we obtain the average packet delays for the hybrid scheme. The results indicate that hybrid multiaccess is an effective technique to mitigate the impact of slow tuning times of optical devices on network performance.