Inverse two-way signaling scheme for optical burst switched networks

Optical burst switching is a promising all-optical switching technology for the next generation optical networks and signaling is one of the key components of it. According to propagation direction of control packets, the existing signaling schemes for optical burst switched networks can be roughly divided into three categories: one-way, two-way, and hybrid signaling. Since one-way signaling launches bursts without the acknowledgment of successful reservation of resources, it has small end-to-end delay but high data loss rate; two-way signaling uses a control packet to gather the state of links and needs the successful acknowledgment before sending out a burst, so it has large end-to-end delay but low data loss rate. A hybrid signaling gets a tradeoff of performance between one-way and two-way signaling. In this paper, we propose another hybrid signaling named inverse two-way signaling. By introducing the process of link state collection into one-way signaling, the inverse two-way signaling can decrease the data loss rate without increasing the end-to-end delay compared to one-way signaling. In other words, the inverse two-way signaling is an improved version of one-way signaling.