Improved flow control in optical burst switched networks for healthcare applications

Many new health care applications require a stable, transparent, well-defined and understood communications network. As the upper-level infrastructure is put in place for telehealth applications including CARS, tele-diagnosis, VoIP and centralized storage of patient records, the development of the network required to provide a stable foundation and high performance for these applications has lagged. In order to improve the network infrastructure for health care applications a new control system for an optical burst switched (OBS) network is being investigated. This OBS control system ensures fairness to TCP flows through the OBS network, and provides real-time quality of service guarantees from OBS edge to OBS edge.