Performance comparison of OCS and OBS switching paradigms

In optical switching paradigm, there are three approaches; optical circuit switching, optical packet switching, and optical burst switching (OBS). OBS is a technology that takes the best features of packet switching and circuit switching by providing a flexible infrastructure for carrying IP traffic and at the same time ensuring efficient utilization of the fiber link. In this paper we propose an effective contention resolution scheme to achieve minimum burst loss at core nodes. Algorithm of zero burst loss for bimodal burst switching is extended from single node star network topology to two node star topology. Scheduling at the core node, typically an optical cross connect (OXC), is performed in two modes i.e., Mode 0 & Mode 1. Mode 0 is for burst transmission between all directly connected edge nodes whereas Mode 1 is for burst transmission through remote core node to a particular destination edge node. Synchronization of the reservation request between the core nodes is a critical task in such a topology. In order to achieve minimum burst loss, using a small length of fiber delay line in recirculation mode results in an effective strategy.

The service evolution and the rapid increase in traffic levels fuel the interest toward switching paradigms enabling the fast allocation of Wavelength Division Multiplexing WDM channels in an on demand fashion with fine granularities (microsecond scales). For this reason, in the last years, different optical switching paradigms have been proposed (Sabella et al., 2000): optical-packet switching (OPS), optical-burst switching (OBS), wavelength-routed OBS, etc. Among the various all-optical switching paradigms, OPS attracts increasing attention. Owing to the high switching rate, Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA) is a key technology to realize Optical Packet Switches. We propose some Optical Packet Switch (OPS) architectures and illustrate their realization in SOA technology. The effectiveness of the technology in reducing the power consumption is also analyzed. The chapter is organized in three sections. The main blocks (Switching Fabric, Wavelength Conversion stage, Synchronization stage) of an OPS are illustrated in Section 2 where we also show some examples of realizing wavelength converters and synchronizers in SOA technology. Section 3 introduces SOA-based single-stage and multi-stage switching fabrics. Finally the SOA-based OPS power consumption is investigated in Section 4.

Optical burst switching (OBS) is regarded as a promising optical switching paradigm for next generation optical Internet. More and more real-time traffic is transported by IP and it is important for OBS to support real-time traffic. Based on the delay analysis of OBS networks, a pipeline scheme is proposed to reduce the delay and efficiently support real-time traffic for OBS networks in the paper. When real-time traffic is transported in the core nodes of the established pipeline and its burst head packet can not need to be processed. So the pipeline scheme reduces the offset time and delay of realtime traffic. The simulation result shows that the pipeline scheme effectively reduces the end-to-end delay of real-time traffic in the OBS networks.

Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) provides a good support for the services requiring high bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS). When the character of network traffic changes from voice-oriented to data-oriented, OCS must cooperate with new switching mechanisms such as Optical Burst Switching (OBS) to improve performance. So a Hybrid Optical Switching (HOS) system is proposed. In HOS, different traffics are classified and both OBS and OCS can be processed. At the same time, delay buffer mechanisms, which are Fiber Delay Line (FDL) and electronic buffering, are introduced in HOS to solve the contention of OBS bursts. And a wavelengths classification mechanism, which assigns some wavelengths dedicated to OCS traffics, is provided to guarantee the QoS of OCS. To analyze the performance in theory, models based on Markovian theory and iterative method are provided. The results got by theory are accurate compared with simulations. The use of delay buffer can decrease the blocking probability of OBS and increase resource utilization. Wavelength classification mechanism benefits to improve OCS's performance.

Optical burst switching (OBS) supports IP-over-photonics for future QoS-supporting Internet through combining advantages of electronic control processing and optical transmission. The resource reservation is critical for OBS. In this paper we examine optical burst switching (OBS) reservation process and discuss the most important parameters and their impact on the performance of the reservation process. A general framework for its modeling and analysis is presented. We model OBS reservation using queueing networks. Our framework and model cover all aspects of OBS reservation process including control packet arrival, offset time assignment. control packet processing, optical switch matrix setup, data burst arrival and transmission. Current models and analysis only consider offset time assignment and data burst arrival and transmission its OBS reservation. Further we show that even though widely assumed and used, conservation law does not hold generally for average burst loss probability for reservation processes which support multiple priority classes.

Next-generation high-speed Internet backbone networks will be required to support a broad range of emerging applications which may not only require significant bandwidth, but may also have strict quality of service (QoS) requirements. Furthermore, the traffic from such applications are expected to be highly bursty in nature. For such traffic, the allocation of static fixed-bandwidth circuits may lead to the over-provisioning of bandwidth resources in order to meet QoS requirements. Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising new technique which attempts to address the problem of efficiently allocating resources for bursty traffic. In OBS, incoming data is assembled into bursts at the edges of the network, and when the burst is ready to be sent, resources in the network are reserved only for the duration of the burst. The reservation of resources is typically made by an out-of-band one-way control message which precedes the burst by some offset time. By reserving resources only for the duration of the burst, a greater degree of utilization may be achieved in the network. This book provides an overview of optical burst switching. Design and research issues involved in the development of OBS networks are discussed, and approaches to providing QoS in OBS networks are presented. Topics include: - Optical burst switching node and network architectures - Burst assembly - Signaling protocols - Contention resolution - Burst scheduling - Quality of service in OBS networks

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is considered as an efficient switching paradigm for building the next generation optical Internet. This review has been motivated by the need for techniques that are capable of supporting the future bandwidth requirement of next-generation applications and services of Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The authors have discussed the basic concepts of OBS paradigm and outlined the signaling and scheduling issues related to OBS networks. Further, a brief summary on the issues that are essential for provisioning Quality-of-Service (QoS) in OBS networks has been outlined. Finally, an analytical model is presented to provide Burst Loss Probability (BLP) guarantees between every pair of source-destination nodes in the network.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) have attracted increasing attention from the research community as a high-performance and low-cost solution to last-mile broadband Internet access. On the other side, Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a promising access technology that uses optical fiber with burst switching paradigm. In this paper, we propose a novel Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) architecture, called Optical Burst Wireless Mesh Architecture (OBWMA) which integrates WMN at the user access side and OBS at the core of the MAN. OBWMA aims to combine advantages of both WMNs and OBS networks, such as large coverage at low cost and bandwidth availability. We specify the details of the interconnection and the internetworking of WMNs and the OBS network in OBWMA. Moreover, we develop an analytical model to compute the end-to-end delay in OBWMA in order to support flow requests with delay constraints. Furthermore, we propose a Control Bridge (CB) that ensures Quality of Service (QoS) mapping at the border between the WMN and the OBS parts. Also, we propose a burst assembly scheme, called Adaptive Hybrid Burst Assembly scheme (AHBA). Simulation results using ns-2 demonstrate the feasibility of OBWMA and the validity of our analytical model.

In this paper, we propose a protocol architecture and quality of service (QoS) supporting algorithms for optical Internet based on optical burst switching (OBS) technology. Firstly, the function of each layer of the protocol architecture and the formats of control packets are defined in order to adopt GMPLS to the control plane of OBS. Then, the offset time decision (OTD) algorithm to cooperate with the proposed protocol architecture is designed for optical Internet. A new burst loss formula taking into account the effect of offset time is introduced to design the OTD algorithm. This algorithm can decide on the appropriate “priority-offset” time according to the required QoS by using the reversed equation of the so-called heuristic loss formula (HLF) which is approximated as a proportional equation of our new loss formula. Finally, we propose a CAC algorithm based on the OTD algorithm for the purpose of increasing the availability of wavelength resources and supporting the QoS of established connections in optical Internet. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated in terms of burst loss rate and the number of connections through simulation.

A crucial issue in optical burst switching (OBS) networks is burst loss caused by resource contention. As a result, many methods are currently being proposed to reduce burst loss rate. These methods can be summed up into two categories: burst scheduling algorithms and contention resolutions. Both categories of methods can reduce burst loss rate to a certain degree. However, to make OBS to become a viable solution, the burst loss rate needs to be further reduced. Furthermore, almost all methods ignore the fact that an unfortunately scheduled, locally generated single-hop burst could block a number of future incoming transit bursts, though the burst just travels to its next downstream node. This phenomenon becomes more evident when links are heavily loaded in mesh OBS networks. To eliminate contention caused by single-hop traffic completely, this paper proposes a novel transfer mode called packet calking by differentiating between single-hop traffic from multihop traffic for OBS networks. An analysis model is developed to evaluate the performance of packet calking. Theoretical results are validated through extensive simulations in both ring and mesh networks. These results show that packet calking outperforms the transfer mode without packet calking in terms of burst loss rate and link utilization.

Dynamic wavelength selection and delayed burst assignment schemes for Optical Burst Switching networks

The most important design goal in Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks is to reduce burst loss resulting from resource contention. Especially, the higher the congestion degree in the network is, the higher the burst loss rate becomes. The burst loss performance can be improved by employing an appropriate congestion control. In this paper, to actively avoid contentions, we propose a dynamic load-aware congestion control scheme that operates based on the highest (called ‘peak load’) of the loads of all links over the path between each pair of ingress and egress nodes in an OBS network. We also propose an algorithm that dynamically determines a load threshold for adjusting burst sending rate, according to the traffic load in a network. Further, a simple signalling method is developed for our proposed congestion control scheme. The proposed scheme aims to (1) reduce the burst loss rate in OBS networks and (2) maintain reasonable throughput and fairness. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduces the burst loss rate significantly, compared to existing OBS protocols (with and without congestion control), while maintaining reasonable throughput and fairness. Simulation results also show that our scheme keeps signalling overhead due to congestion control at a low level.

Optical fiber networks provide huge bandwidth to accommodate the rapid growth of Internet traffic. Due to bursty nature of the Internet traffic, optical burst switching (OBS) is highly suitable for metropolitan area networks compared to circuit switching. This paper devises and presents three new scheduling algorithms for OBS based metropolitan area networks capable of providing quality of service (QoS) to delay sensitive applications. Specifically, these algorithms are able to provide differentiated service to voice, video and data traffic according to their acceptable performance metrics. Detailed simulation experiments are presented which were used to study the performance and to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheduling algorithms with augmented QoS capabilities over a ring OBS network.

Optical burst switching (OBS) has been proposed as the next generation optical network for grid computing. In this paper, we envision a heterogeneous Grid served by an Optical Burst Switching framework, where grid traffic co-exists with IP and/or a 10 GE based traffic to achieve economy of scale. This paper addresses the latency that Grid jobs experience in OBS networks. The injection of jumbo size grid jobs can potentially affect the latency experienced by IP/10GE traffic. Simulation results have shown that in Grids served by an optical burst switch, grid jobs consistently have lower latency than co-existing IP/10GE traffic, with a slightly elevated latency of IP/10GE traffic when the size of grid jobs increases. We conclude that given the fact that OBS can efficiently handle the enormous amount of bandwidth made available by DWDM technology, Grid over Optical Burst Switching is a cost effective way to provide grid services, even for latency sensitive grid computing applications.

In this paper the end-to-end TCP performance of a hybrid network composed of multiple Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs) in the access segment connected to the same edge node of a core network is evaluated. Three possible core network paradigms are considered: Optical Circuit Switching (OCS), Optical Burst Switching (OBS) and Optical Packet Switching (OPS). TCP performance is evaluated through simulations with ns-2. The hybrid network scalability is assessed by varying the number of EPONs connected to the same edge node and the number of Optical Network Units (ONUs) per EPON. Interoperability issues between access and core are investigated and the impact of the most important network parameters is highlighted. The three transfer modes considered for the core network are properly compared under different input conditions, discussing the related trade-offs that may lead to the most suitable choice based on the specific application scenario. Finally, some design issues are investigated with reference to emerging Long-Range EPON (LR-EPON) solutions.