A preemptive scheduling scheme for flexible QoS provisioning in OBS networks

In optical burst switching (OBS) networks one of the most challenging problems is to provide service differentiation. The lack of buffering in the intermediate nodes, makes QoS provisioning in OBS networks a difficult problem to address. In this work, we propose a scheduling algorithm that supports QoS based on preemptions, which are controlled by a novel preemption policy. Our claims are validated by analytical modelling and experimental analysis through simulations using data belonging to two different classes of service - best effort and video streaming data. Performance evaluation is based on throughput measurements for best effort class, and perceived quality metrics like PSNR and MOS scores for the video streaming class.