Performance evaluation of hybrid optical switching with quality of service

Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) is a switching technique which has been used in the core of the optical network for many years but Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS) are also some of the promising switching techniques fast emerging in the optical network. All of these techniques have some advantages and disadvantages. Flow Transfer Mode (FTM) is a hybrid optical switching technique that aims to leverage strengths of these switching techniques and integrates all of these techniques into a single switching technique. It classifies incoming traffic into different data flows. It is also considered as an extension of the OBS. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the FTM through simulation and perform comparative analysis with the OBS under same simulation parameters. In future, internet may ultimately be constrained by the capability to provide quality of service (QoS), so we also propose and employ QoS provisioning in the FTM and evaluate its performance with QoS. Our results show noticeable improvement in burst loss ratio, bandwidth utilization and throughput.