A performance study on optical burst switched networks: the ring topology

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Existing performance studies on optical burst switched (OBS) networks have been focusing on channel blocking, i.e., when the required wavelength is not available on a link along a burst’s route. However, we identify another type of blocking as the receiver blocking, i.e., when the receiver at a burst’s destination node is occupied by another burst. Receiver blocking may account for the much larger part of total burst blocking. Receiver blocking has been largely ignored in existing research. In this paper we propose using multiple receivers or fiber delay lines (FDL) in front of the receivers in order to reduce the receiver blocking probability. Extensive simulation results on bi-directional OBS rings are presented to illustrate the problem and the performance of our proposed approaches. The results indicate that receiver blocking can be almost eliminated by using as little as three receivers and can be reduced by using a FDL of small length. To our knowledge, this is the first performance study that covers both channel and receiver blocking for OBS networks.