Patent ID: 7200340

Claim:
A non-uniform composite-star network comprising: at least three edge nodes; and an optical core including at least two optical core nodes, where said at least two optical core nodes are not connected to each other, each of said at least two optical core nodes terminating input links originating from at least one of said at least three edge nodes and each of said at least two optical core nodes originating output links terminating on at least one of said at least three edge nodes; wherein at least two of said optical core nodes have a different core reach index, where a core reach index of a given optical core node is a metric based on a number of edge nodes to which said given optical core node directly connects; and wherein a selected optical core node among said optical core nodes, terminating J input links and originating K output links, is selected to minimize a capacity-delay product given by: ( ∑ j = 0 J - 1 ⁢ ⁢ L j ⁢ D j + ∑ k = 0 K - 1 ⁢ Λ k ⁢ Λ k ) where L j is the number of channels in input link j, D j is the propagation delay along input link j, 0≦j<J, Λ k is the number of channels in output link k, Δ k is the propagation delay along output link j, 0≦k<K.