Adaptive Optical Burst Switching

We propose a modified version of Optical Burst Switching (OBS) that adapts the size of switched data units to the network load. Specifically, we propose a two-way reservation OBS scheme in which every active source-destination pair attempts to reserve a lightpath and for every successful reservation, transmits an optical burst whose size is proportional to the number of active data flows. We refer to this technique as Adaptive Optical Burst Switching. We prove that the proposed scheme is optimal in the sense that the network is stable for all traffic intensities in the capacity region. We also evaluate the throughput and delay performance of adaptive OBS through both analysis and simulation in order to assess the practical load ranges at which the network may operate.