Dynamic load balancing in IP-over-WDM optical burst switching networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of dynamic load balancing in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-based optical burst switching (OBS) networks. We propose a load balancing scheme based on adaptive alternate routing aimed at reducing burst loss. The key idea of adaptive alternate routing is to reduce network congestion by adaptively distributing the load between two pre-determined link-disjoint alternative paths based on the measurement of the impact of traffic load on each of them. We develop two alternative-path selection schemes to select link-disjoint alternative paths to be used by adaptive alternate routing. The path selection schemes differ in the way the cost of a path is defined and in the assumption made about the knowledge of the traffic demands. Through extensive simulation experiments for different traffic scenarios, we show that the proposed dynamic load balancing algorithm outperforms the shortest path routing and static alternate routing algorithms.