Design and performance evaluation of a metro WDM storage area network with IP datagram support

Storage area networks (SANs) are becoming an important part of optical MANs (metropolitan area networks). Growing storage and business-continuity needs; high-bandwidth, low latency requirements for SANs; storage infrastructure consolidation; and post-9/11 regulatory issues are among the several driving factors to push this trend. We, in this paper, consider a metro wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) SAN that allows the transmission of variable packet size such as Internet protocol (IP) datagram and evaluate its performance by means of discrete-event simulation. The network is based on one fixed transmitter and multiple fixed receivers. Beginning with an introduction and the context of this work, we describe the network and node architectures; and introduce the medium access control (MAC) protocols. Subsequently, using the Poisson and self-similar traffic, we present and discuss performance of the proposed network architecture in terms of throughput and queuing delay under symmetric and asymmetric traffic scenarios. The simulation results suggested that the proposed architecture is suitable for SAN applications which demand low queuing delay and high throughput.