A PERFORMANCE COMPARISON BETWEEN GRAPH AND HYPERGRAPH TOPOLOGIES FOR PASSIVE STAR WDM LIGHTWAVE NETWORKS

Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) allows the huge bandwidth of op tical fiber to be divided into several high-speed channels in optical passive star based networks. For such processor networks, most of the proposed architectures for interconnecting nodes are based on graph to pologies. Recently, topologies based on the hypergraph theory have eme rged, motivated by the observation that each multiplexed channel can a ctually be seen as a logical resource shared among many processors, an d not only between two of them. In this paper, we show that these hype rgraph passive star WDM lightwave networks present many advantages wit h respect to graph-based ones, in terms of simulated packet delivery t ime, average number of hops, link utilization, and throughput. Further more, they use only a constant number of transceivers per node, and a sub-linear number of multiplexed channels. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B .V.