Optimal node placement in an optical packet switching Manhattan street network

The judicious allocation of traffic matrix sources/destinations to nodes of an exemplar optical packet switching architecture, the Manhattan street network, is studied in this paper. The node placement optimisation (NPO) problem is intractable, hence simulated annealing is used to find (near) optimal solutions expeditiously. A number of nonuniform traffic patterns are considered, facilitating the study of the innate parameters of a traffic matrix that affect the optimisation results. A salient finding is that, regardless of the underlying traffic pattern, the efficacy of NPO is correlated to the coefficient of variation of the traffic matrix. 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.