DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF OPTICAL COMPUTER NETWORKS

Abstract

Existing networks are becoming increasingly congested as a growing number of users seek access to the vast amount of information available on the Internet. At the same time, emerging multimedia applications, such as video conferencing, interactive television, and video-on-demand are expected to further test the limits of current network infrastructures. There is an immediate need for the development of new, evolutionary high- capacity networks, which are capable of supporting these growing bandwidth requirements. Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) is a promising solution for satisfying this bandwidth bottleneck. As WDM deployment becomes widespread, new network architectures and protocols, which take advantage of WDM's capabilities, will need to be developed. This dissertation investigates network architectures and protocols for WDM network, with the goals of measuring the performance of existing approaches and developing new architectures and protocols, which provide improved performance.

This work provides an in-depth case study of a single-hop protocol used in WDM local lightwave network that has been built, viz., the IBM Rainbow network. Specifically, the study focused on a quantitative analysis of the performance characteristics of Rainbow's in-band polling protocol.

The Rainbow system is difficult to be analyzed directly, because each station can be in any large number of states. The size of the state space therefore growth exponentially with the number of stations in the system. A framework for analyzing the Rainbow protocol was provided using the equ- ilibrium point analysis (EPA) technique. By assuming that the system remains at its equilibrium point, we can reduce the complexity of the