Role of Provider Strategies and Granularity in a Circuit-Packet Optical Choice-based Network

Every advancement of optical technology provides new options to network providers in competing with each other for customers’ business, but also requires additional design and operational decisions. Optical switches capable of using any given waveband channel for either optical packet switching or circuit (lightpath) switching, such as OPCINet, provide such an advance. We show that not only is the pricing strategy used by the provider critically important in the utilization and performance of network resources, but that such decisions must consider the granularity (i.e. number of wavelengths in a waveband) of provisioning.