Wavelength converters: improvement on the performance of optical networks

Recently a lot of studies have been focused on the impact of the wavelength converters in a DWDM network for different switch architectures and different traffic load conditions. In addition, most of the previous studies, has assumed that the holding time of the wavelength connection is similar to that of telephone calls. This is not practical in the current optical network applications since most of connections stay permanently. In this paper, we consider new switch architecture with partial wavelength conversion capability. We investigate the benefit of the wavelength conversion in a DWDM network with limited number of wavelength converters assuming that the holding time of the wavelength connection is infinite. Our simulation results indicate that the performance of an optical network with only 25% of wavelength conversion capability is very close to that of an optical network with full wavelength conversion, for the network topology and traffic pattern considered. In another Metro application, we observe that the use of wavelength converters does not have any impact on the network performance.