| The Internet traffic has been growing tremendously. China Telecom predicts that the compound annual growth rate of IP traffic for the next decade is at 56% - 80% and the backbone capacity will grow by another two orders of magnitudes. Furthermore, the power consumption incurred by the next generation of huge electronic IP packet switching routers in the backbone will exceed gigawatts. In view of the grave enviromnental concerns, there is a great need for a more efficient way of transporting and switching the bits. This thesis investigates a new all-optical networking technology called optical flow switching (OFS). OFS bypasses electronic routers, and provides end-to-end transparent connections, thus taking full advantage of the enormous transmission capacity of optical networks and enjoying the extremely low error rate of transparent data transmission. The most important point about OFS is that it reduces the electrical power consumption by off-loading the huge electronic routers, which could be a major constraint for future Internet growth. Unlike many other exotic all-optical switching technologies, OFS is immediately deployable using the current optical technologies, Therefore OFS is very attractive for the next generation optical networks.;OFS provisions bandwidth in the granularity of one wavelength. With such a coarse granularity, most applications including video download, HDTV, 3D movie, and 3D TV etc. will have very short flow sizes, in the order of seconds or even sub-second, which brings challenges to the utilization efficiency of bandwidth capacity. In this thesis we study the performance of OFS for short flows. The constraint of network resources is investigated. The effect of destination and path blocking is studied. A distributed scheduling protocol called Multi-Destination Control Protocol (MDCP) is proposed to deal with such constraint. Both single wavelength and multi-wavelength configurations are studied and characterized. Simulation results demonstrate that MDCPcan improve the OFS network throughput significantly and can be as much as eighty to one hundred percent for a single-wavelength OFS network. Even for an OFS network with four wavelengths, the throughput improvement can still approach 40%. |
