Evaluation of QoS differentiation mechanisms in asynchronous bufferless optical packet-switched networks

Existing quality of service differentiation schemes for today's IP over point-to-point optical WDM networks take advantage of electronic RAM to implement traffic management algorithms in order to isolate the service classes. Since practical optical RAM is not available, these techniques are not suitable for a future all-optical network. Hence, new schemes are needed to support QoS differentiation in optical packet-switched (OPS) networks. In this article we first present an overview of existing QoS differentiation mechanisms suitable for asynchronous bufferless OPS. We then compare the performance of the presented schemes and qualitatively discuss implementation issues, in order to evaluate the mechanisms. In particular, we present an evaluation framework, which quantifies the throughput reduction observed when migrating from a best effort scenario to a service-differentiated scenario. Our study shows that preemption-based schemes have the best performance, but also the highest implementation complexity