A photonic container switched transport network to support long-haul traffic at the core

The ever-growing demand for network capacity has resulted in the inception of optical burst switching (OBS) offering all-optical transmission, high-speed data rates and format transparent switching. But the current OBS architecture is very complex requiring costly fiber delay lines and quality of service management (QoS) techniques. In this paper we propose a new OBS architecture based on photonic container switching to be deployed in the core network. We show that our architecture will solve most of the complexities of existing OBS mechanisms, and in fact will make the core an all-optical, zero packet loss network that will also guarantee equal QoS to all the users. The packets are actually packed in fixed size containers which will be converted into an optical burst and transmitted through the network. Obviously a major issue to solve in our architecture is the scheduler design that ensures zero packet loss and no optical-to-electrical switching in the intermediate nodes. We devise a divide and conquer solution for the scheduler design problem and present some efficient algorithms for the same. We also analyze the performance of our algorithms under varying traffic conditions and network topologies, to ascertain their efficiency and robustness.