A novel technique for resolving burst contention in OBS networks

Abstract

In this article, in order to resolve burst contention (burst dropping), a new scheme for an optical burst switching (OBS) network has been proposed which is based on the integration of wavelength selection and burst assignment. The proposed scheme provides proportional differentiated services in bufferless OBS networks by dynamically assigning more and longer periods of wavelengths to higher priority classes. In addition, burst head packets (BHPs) are buffered electrically so that fiber delay lines are unnecessary at core nodes. As a result, BHP of a lower priority class is buffered at the core router when it cannot find an available wavelength. It has an opportunity to reschedule its burst to the wavelengths that have been assigned to higher priority classes but have not yet been reserved. The proposed integrated scheme not only provides proportional differentiated services but also achieves lower average dropping probability without any preemption or segmentation mechanisms. Compared with existing approaches, the proposed integrated scheme does not need to generate any special packets and needs to maintain only a few parameters at core nodes.The proposed scheme has several attractive features such as fast, simple implementation and improved burst dropping performance. Extensive simulation results have been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in comparison to traditional schemes. © 2010 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.