Parallel reservation protocols for achieving fairness in optical burst switching

Optical burst switching (OBS) is one promising method for data transfer in photonic networks based on a WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) technology. In the OBS scheme, the wavelength is exclusively reserved along the source and destination nodes, when the burst data is generated at the source. Then, efficient data transfer is expected. However, its performance is heavily dependent on the number of links that the lightpath goes through, We propose a new protocol for OBS networks, where the lightpath for the burst transmission is set up by parallel wavelength reservations. Through simulation results, we show that our protocol makes data transfer efficiently and improves the fairness among the connections with different number of hop counts.