Novel contention resolution technique for QoS support in connection-oriented optical packet switching

This paper considers an optical packet-switched node with limited buffer capabilities and subject to asynchronous, variable-length packets and connection-oriented operation. In such a scenario, we address the problem of providing QoS. While existing solutions focus on applying some form of resources reservation on top of the contention resolution algorithm, here we propose a novel method: given a set of K categories of service to be provided in the network, K different contention resolution algorithms are implemented to cope with the requirements of such service categories. In this paper, we define three different OPS service categories based on three different contention resolution algorithms, we design an ad-hoc pool of fiber delay lines for such a scheme, and evaluate its performance by simulation. The obtained results indicate the merits of our method which opens up future interesting developments for a whole network scenario studies.