Performance analysis of burst segmentation schemes supporting multiple traffic classes

Optical burst switching (OBS) with the support of multiple traffic classes is an important topic. Assuming traffic classes are maintained, via choosing different offset times, a new OBS scheme called optical burst switching with burst splining (OBSS) is proposed in this paper. OBSS provides high system throughput by taking advantages of the idle gaps on output wavelength channels when the just-enough-time (JET) reservation scheme is used. Then an analytical model that supports N traffic classes is constructed and verified by simulations. The proposed model can be applied to the conventional OBS schemes as well as the OBSS scheme we proposed. Numerical results show that in our OBSS scheme, traffic classes can be effectively maintained via different offset times, and the packet loss probability is also much smaller than the conventional OBS. It is interesting to find that the choice of offset time for a specific traffic class affects the packet loss probabilities of classes higher than it, while the impact to classes below it is much smaller.