A hybrid signaling protocol for enhancing performance of OBS networks

A new hybrid signaling scheme is proposed in this work, that combines a two-way with an one-way reservation protocol. The key idea is to synchronize the assembly process with the reservation and hard reserve part of the end-to-end path in two way mode, for a duration equal to the burst assembly time. In this way, upon the arrival of the first packet in the assembly queue, the two-way reservation part of the signaling scheme may start simultaneously. Upon the completion of the burst assembly process, burst transmission may start immediately since the path has been successfully established for a certain number of hops. The framework that we propose benefits from the parallel execution of the signaling messages and the assembly process, and exploits the burstification delay to guarantee burst transmission for at least a part of the network path.