Absolute QoS signalling and reservation in optical burst-switched networks

Recently, some absolute QoS schemes have been proposed to offer quantitative loss guarantees at core nodes in OBS networks. By moving the admission control process to core nodes, which have the most updated information about their own traffic conditions, these schemes can provide reliable and robust per-link loss guarantees. However, the issue of how to provide edge-to-edge guarantees for burst flows over the entire edge-to-edge paths have not been investigated in any of the proposals. In this paper, we propose a signalling and reservation scheme to coordinate the reservation and teardown process over the edge-to-edge path in the absolute QoS model. The key idea is to judiciously divide the edge-to-edge loss requirement into a series of small loss probabilities that are allocated to the intermediate links. The performance of the scheme is evaluated through simulation.