Quality of service provisioning in metropolitan area networks using optical burst switching

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.