A survey of differentiated QoS schemes in optical burst switched networks

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) has proved to be an efficient paradigm for supporting IP-over-WDM networks. The growth of a variety of applications which transmit voice, data, video and multimedia, has necessitated the need to provide Quality of Service over OBS networks. We present a survey of various existing schemes that provide differentiated service. We classify these schemes based on the stage at which service differentiation is performed, namely assembly time, reservation, scheduling, and contention resolution and compare the advantages and disadvantages of each scheme. We then present a model of how differentiated QoS can be provided in terms of various grades of protection mechanisms.