Dynamic burst discarding scheme for deflection routing in optical burst switching networks

This paper proposes a dynamic burst discarding scheme for deflection routing in optical burst switching networks. In general, deflection routing is effective in lightly loaded situations, whereas it has a contrary effect in congested networks because deflected bursts accelerate network congestion. Thus deflection routing should be employed in lightly loaded networks. Incoming traffic, however, varies in time and location, so that temporal and/or local congestion cannot be avoided. Our proposed scheme resolves this problem in the following way. Each node autonomously detects congestion with local information, and bursts to be deflected are discarded in a probabilistic manner, based on the degree of detected congestion and the numbers of elapsed and remaining hops of those bursts. Simulation experiments show that when congestion happens temporarily, the proposed scheme reduces the burst loss probability, and it utilizes network resources efficiently when local congestion happens.