Performance analysis and improvement of loss recovery mechanisms in star OBS networks

In OBS networks, burst loss affects negatively the performance of the higher layers. Proactive loss recovery mechanisms, such as burst cloning, have the advantage of low burst delay but it suffers from low bandwidth utilization. However, reactive loss recovery mechanisms, such as burst retransmission, have the advantage of high bandwidth utilization but at the cost of high burst delay. In this paper, we present an analysis of this trade-off and we propose two new schemes to improve bandwidth utilization while keeping burst delay as low as possible in star OBS networks. The first scheme controls the retransmissions. The second scheme combines burst cloning and burst retransmission mechanisms. Analytical and simulation results show that the both schemes achieve high bandwidth utilization. The results confirm also that compared to basic burst retransmission scheme, the first scheme reduces burst delay only at moderate and high load, however, the second scheme reduce delay at every load.