Enhanced Congestion Management for Minimizing Network Performance Degradation in OBS Networks

Current global data traffic is increasingly dominated by delay and loss intolerant IP traffic which generally displays a structural self-similarity. This has necessitated the introduction of optical burst switching (OBS) as a supporting optical backbone network switching technology. Due to the buffer-less nature of optical burst switched (OBS) networks, contention/congestion in the core network can quickly lead to degradation in overall network performance at moderate to high traffic levels due to heavy burst loses. Several approaches have been explored to address this problem, notably measures that would minimize burstification delays, congestion, blocking at the same time enhancing end-to-end throughput as well as rational and fair utilization of the links. The aim is to achieve a consistent quality of service (QoS). Noting that congestion minimization is key to a consistent QoS provisioning, in this paper we propose a congestion management approach called enhanced congestion management (ECM) that seeks to guarantee a consistent QoS as well as rational and fair use of available links. It is primarily a service differentiation based scheme that aims at congestion, blocking and latency minimization, by way of combining time averaged delay segmented burstification as well as random shortest path selection based deflection routing and wavelength assignment. Simulation results show that ECM can effectively minimise congestion and at the same time improve both throughput and effective utilization, under moderate to high network traffic conditions. Overall, we show that the approach guarantees a consistent QoS.