Design and Analysis of a Multicasting and Fault-Tolerant Optical Crossconnect for All-Optical Networks

This paper proposes an optical crossconnect (MFOXC) architecture that supports multicasting and fault tolerance. First, a tap-based and two splitter-based MFOXC node architectures are presented for wavelength routed all-optical networks. Compared to the existing optical crossconnects, the proposed MFOXC node not only performs multicasting efficiently but also improves reliability significantly. The MFOXC Introduces a new feature (fault tolerance) and keeps the multicasting capability. It can be used at some critical points in a network to improve the overall reliability and multicast performance. Furthermore, the probability of maintaining fault free operations has been investigated for both MFOXC architectures. We present our evaluation results with a commonly used reliability measure, the mean time between failures (MTBF). Finally, we have proposed the cost and the sensitivity analysis for these MFOXC structures. The cost model and the sensitivity analysis show that the cost reduction in different components has various different impacts on the total cost of a MFOXC architecture. It can help us to know which component dominates the total cost and how to make a decision to choose among different MFOXC structures. The simulation results show that (1) the decrease of 75% in the cost of the N × N switch will result in the reduction of 20% in the total cost of the tap-based MFOXC, (2) the 1 × 2 switch has a big impact on the cost of the splitter-based MFOXC structures, and (3) the variation in the cost of the splitter does not introduce significant disadvantage to the type II splitter-based MFOXC structure.