Performance comparison of OBS and SONET in metropolitan ring networks

This paper explores the feasibility of deploying optical burst switching (OBS) in metropolitan area networks (MANs) as an alternative to synchronous optical network (SONET), over wavelength-division multiplexing. We present a comparison between two OBS architectures (with centralized and distributed scheduling schemes), SONET, and next-generation SONET (NG-SONET), respectively. We quantify some of the performance metrics such as end-to-end delay and loss rate when supporting Ethernet traffic in metro ring networks. Our simulation results show that OBS offers significant performance improvement over SONET and NG-SONET. In general, the OBS architecture with distributed scheduling has a superior delay performance, whereas the OBS architecture with centralized scheduling has a better loss metric.