Equivalent random analysis of a buffered optical switch with general interarrival times

We propose an approximate analytic model of an optical switch with fibre delay lines and wavelength converters by employing Equivalent Random Theory. General arrival traffic is modelled by means of Gamma-distributed interarrival times. The analysis is formulated in terms of virtual traffic flows within the optical switch from which we derive expressions for burst blocking probability, fibre delay line occupancy and mean delay. Emphasis is on approximations that give good numerical efficiency so that the method can be useful for formulating dimensioning problems for large-scale networks. Numerical solution values from the proposed analysis method compare well with results from a discrete-event simulation of an optical burst switch

Multiservice QoS-Enabled MAC for Optical Burst Switching

The emergence of a broad range of network-driven applications (e.g., multimedia, online gaming) brings in the need for a network environment able to provide multiservice capabilities with diverse quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. In this paper, a medium access control protocol is proposed to support multiple services and QoS levels in optical burst-switched mesh networks without wavelength conversion. The protocol provides two different access mechanisms, queue-arbitrated and prearbitrated for connectionless and connection-oriented burst transport, respectively. It has been evaluated through extensive simulations and its simplistic form makes it very promising for implementation and deployment. Results indicate that the protocol can clearly provide a relative quality differentiation for connectionless traffic and guarantee null (or negligible, and thus acceptable) burst loss probability for a wide range of network (or offered) load while ensuring low access delay for the higher-priority traffic. Furthermore, in the multiservice scenario mixing connectionless and connection-oriented burst transmissions, three different prearbitrated slot scheduling algorithms are evaluated, each one providing a different performance in terms of connection blocking probability. The overall results demonstrate the suitability of this architecture for future integrated multiservice optical networks

New contention resolution techniques for optical burst switching

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a technology positioned between wavelength routing and optical packet switching that does not require optical buffering or packet-level parsing, and it is more efficient than circuit switching when the sustained traffic volume does not consume a full wavelength. However, several critical issues still need to be solved such as contention resolution without optical buffering which is a key determinant of packet-loss with a significant impact on network performance. Deflection routing is an approach for resolving contention by routing a contending packet to an output port other than the intended output port. In OBS networks, when contention between two bursts cannot be resolved through deflection routing, one of the bursts will be dropped. However, this scheme doesn’t take advantage of all the available resources in resolving contentions. Due to this, the performance of existing deflection routing scheme is not satisfactory. In this thesis, we propose and evaluate three new strategies which aim at resolving contention. We propose a new approach called Backtrack on Deflection Failure, which provides a second chance to blocked bursts when deflection failure occurs. The bursts in this scheme, when blocked, will get an opportunity to backtrack to the previous node and may get routed through any deflection route available at the previous node. Two variants are proposed for handling the backtracking delay involved in this scheme namely: (a) Increase in Initial Offset and (b) Open-Loop Reservation. Furthermore, we propose a third scheme called Bidirectional Reservation on Burst Drop in which bandwidth reservation is made in both the forward and the backward directions simultaneously. This scheme comes into effect only when control bursts get dropped due to bandwidth unavailability. The retransmitted control bursts will have larger offset value and because of this, they will have lower blocking probability than the original bursts. The performance of our schemes and of those proposed in the literature is studied through simulation. The parameters considered in evaluating these schemes are blocking probability, average throughput, and overall link utilization. The results obtained show that our schemes perform significantly better than their standard counterparts

Performance and cost analysis of all-optical switching: OBS and OCS

This paper presents a study of performance and cost analysis of optical circuit switching (OCS) and optical burstswitching (OBS) by proposing the clear images of their node architectures and cost formulations. Then, we apply servicelevel agreement (SLA) of the high quality of service application in the terms of network blocking probability and averagenetwork delay to demonstrate OCS and OBS performances, their investment costs, and network dimensioning methodology.Applying SLA to our studies can illustrate the impact of contention resolution and blocking resolution schemes to theperformances and costs of OBS and OCS, accordingly. The simulations illustrate that OBS applying WC gives the bestperformance among all architectures deploying the same offered bandwidth. The investigations also show that WC is a majortechnique contributing high performance gain to both OCS and OBS. Especially for OBS, WC is an important scheme allowingOBS high data grooming property as its performance gain contributing to OBS is much higher than those of OCS. For thecost analysis, OCS is the most economic among all architectures. BA provides the most cost effectiveness among all OBScontention resolution schemes. Lastly, FDL is the least cost effective scheme as it gives little performance enhancement butadds more cost to the network

Performance issues in optical burst/packet switching

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01524-3_8This chapter summarises the activities on optical packet switching (OPS) and optical burst switching (OBS) carried out by the COST 291 partners in the last 4 years. It consists of an introduction, five sections with contributions on five different specific topics, and a final section dedicated to the conclusions. Each section contains an introductive state-of-the-art description of the specific topic and at least one contribution on that topic. The conclusions give some points on the current situation of the OPS/OBS paradigms

QoS Considerations in OBS Switched Backbone Net-Works

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) was proposed as a hybrid switching technology solution to handle the multi-Terabit volumes of traffic anticipated to traverse Future Generation backbone Networks. With OBS, incoming data packets are assembled into super-sized packets called data bursts and then assigned an end to end light path. Key challenging areas with regards to OBS Networks implementation are data bursts assembling and scheduling at the network ingress and core nodes respectively as they are key to minimizing subsequent losses due to contention among themselves in the core nodes. These losses are significant contributories to serious degradation in renderable QoS. The paper overviews existing methods of enhancing it at both burst and transport levels. A distributed resources control architecture is proposed together with a proposed wavelength assignment algorithm

Distributed Resources Assignment for Optical Burst Switching without Wavelength Conversion (Invited Paper)

The amount of bursty Internet traffic leads to develop new architectures and technologies, such as Optical Burst Switching (OBS), to efficiently satisfy future bandwidth requirements. Burst loss probability is an important quality of service metric for OBS due to its bufferless characteristic, even more critical without wavelengths converters. So, resource assignment is an important issue to solve in OBS networks. In this paper, two distributed resources assignment schemes without wavelength conversion capability are proposed. Whereas the first one is applied at the edge nodes to achieve a loss-free core network, the second is an enhanced routing and wavelength assignment scheme applied at core nodes. Simulation results indicate that the first scheme offers a loss-free solution with blocking probability only at ingress nodes and high traffic load. The second one reduces the network-wide burst loss probability significantly compared with other schemes.Postprint (published version