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

A Priority Based Optical Header Contention Resolution in Optical Burst Switching Networks

OBS is a promising switching paradigm for the next-generation Internet.In OBS, data packets are assembled into variable size data burst which are transmitted optically over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing(DWDM)networks without O/E/O conversion. The control packet is sent before the data burst to reserve resources and configure switches along the path .The control packet is sent along the separate control channel and goes through O/E/O conversion. We have discussed various OBS signalling protocols and Burst Scheduling Algorithms. As the data channel bandwidth will grow it will lead to the overloading of the control path. In this thesis we have proposed an algorithm to resolve the contention of the optical header. The algorithm assigns the priority to each control packet arriving at the same time .The control packet with highest priority is selected for processing. Simulation results have shown that the technique is effective in improving the throughput

MANAGING CONTENTION AVOIDANCE AND MAXIMIZING THROUGHPUT IN OBS NETWORK

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a promising technology for future optical networks. Due to its less complicated implementation using current optical and electrical components, OBS is seen as the first step towards the future Optical Packet Switching (OPS). In OBS, a key problem is to schedule bursts on wavelength channels whose bandwidth may become fragmented with the so-called void (or idle) intervals with both fast and bandwidth efficient algorithms so as to reduce burst loss. In this paper, a new scheme has been proposed to improve the throughput and to avoid the contention in the OBS network. The proposed scheme offers the same node complexity as that in general OBS networks with optical buffers. Also, it avoids burst blockings in transit nodes, turning it into an efficient and simple burst contention avoidance mechanism. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has improvement of 15% in terms of burst loss probability as compared to OBS existing schemes and also maximizes the throughput of the network without deteriorating excessively other parameters such as end to end delay or ingress queues

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