Quality of Service in Hybrid Optical Switching

Network traffic is continuously increasing over the internet due to emerging end user applications provided by cloud computing. Optical networks are hence rapidly gaining exclusivity in access networks and data center networks as they provide huge bandwidth support. Optical switching techniques like Optical Circuit Switching (OCS), Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS) have some advantages and limitations. Flow Transfer Mode (FTM) is hybrid optical switching technique that aims to utilize the benefits of existing switching techniques. It is a universal switching method that classifies traffic flows into different modes. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of FTM and propose QoS provisioning in FTM as QoS provisioning is a desired feature of future next generation network. Our results show improvement in burst loss ratio, bandwidth utilization and throughput.