Performance comparison of OCS and OBS switching paradigms

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a new optical switching paradigm where traffic can be switched and groomed at a lower level compared to optical switched circuit (OCS). While OCS is useful in carrying highly aggregated long-lived streams that require absolute quality of service (QoS) guarantees, OBS has a role in efficiently carrying bursty best-effort traffic. In this paper, we investigate further the comparative goodput and bandwidth efficiency of OBS and OCS using, on one hand, an adaptive deflection OBS routing that aims at minimizing the burst loss rate and, on the other hand, a routing and wavelength OCS strategy using the best possible routing paths for minimizing the blocking rate.