Provision of differentiated performance in Optical Burst Switching networks based on burst assembly processes

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) has been designed as a practical solution for the high-speed transport network using enabling optical technologies, which can work without optical buffering or pure optical signal processing in the intermediate nodes. As a collection of many packets, optical bursts exhibit different traffic characteristics in the bufferless optical core networks compared to the packet-level traffic in the conventional electronic switching systems. However, many OBS studies often neglect this issue by assuming the inputs to be optical bursts when analyzing the system performance. This paper demonstrates that the loss performance of optical bursts is dramatically different when considering burst assembly process at the edge nodes and the connectivity of the core nodes. We develop some analytical models which can model the loss performance more accurately than the traditional methods. Based on our observations, we propose a scheme to support differentiated loss performances for optical bursts by modifying the burst assembly parameters at the source edge nodes. Our scheme is implemented at the edge nodes and there is no specific requirement to the core nodes. Thus, our design provides good flexibility and scalability in the heterogeneous Internet.