A differentiated QoS aware multipath routing algorithm for optical burst switched networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is thought to be the best way to adapt the bursty IP traffic over optical WDM networks. It provides statistical multiplexing gains and avoids long end to end setup time of traditional virtual circuit configuration. However, under the current and foreseeable limitations of optical technology, performance of OBS is mainly hampered at network nodes by burst contention. The contention is serious constraints on the capacity of OBS networks. A leading source of contention is the congestion at congested links where a limited number of wavelengths are shared by a lot of bursts. These congested links are stemming from burst routing algorithms. In this paper, we studied on routing path competition phenomenon. We proposed a differentiated QoS aware multipath routing algorithm for OBS networks. This algorithm is evaluated through extensive numerical studies over a typical topology-the 14-node NSFnet. Results show that it outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of burst blocking probability and link utilization.