On modeling optical burst switching networks with fiber delay lines: A novel approach

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) has been widely admitted as a viable candidate for the evolving all-optical network control framework of nowadays Internet core to meet the explosive demand of bandwidth constraints in multimedia and real-time applications. A number of analytical models have been proposed to characterize the behavior of OBS networks. These models, however, do not imitate the actual features of the Fiber Delay Line (FDL) components present in contemporary optical switches. Underscoring the precise behavior of FDLs leads to misleading results regarding major performance measures of OBS networks. While FDLs behavior has been neglected in many studies, as a crude approximation, a few researches characterize FDLs as conventional buffers present in electronic switching systems. In this paper, we provide an inclusive discussion on the features of FDLs, followed by presenting a novel analytical model to realize the inimitable characteristics of FDLs. The proposed network-level model is based on the results of queuing systems with impatient customers and deterministic impatience time. The viability of the proposed model is validated through extensive simulation experiments.