Efficient Resource Reservation for Optical Burst Switching Networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is one promising method for data transfer in photonic networks based on a WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) technology. In the OBS scheme, the wavelength is exclusively reserved along the source and destination nodes, when the burst data is generated at the source. Then, efficient data transfer is expected. However, its performance is heavily dependent on the number of links that the lightpath goes through. TCP-based applications account for a majority of data traffic in the Internet; thus understanding and improving the performance of TCP over OBS networks is critical. In this paper, we present a new parallel wavelength reservation method for optical burst switching (OBS) networks based on adapting the set of potential wavelengths with the number of hops in the path. The uniqueness of this work when compared to existing works is that buffering resources, which consist of Optical Delay Lines (ODLs), are considered in the reservation mechanism. The consequence of this is that the time made by the segments in the various buffers across the selected path is taken into consideration. Various simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the scheme. It is found that our approach has better performance than previous related works reported in the literature.