Abstract
Focusing on the principles and the paradigm of OBS an overview addressing expectable performance and application issues is presented. Proposals on OBS were published over a decade and the presented techniques spread into many directions. The paper comprises discussions of several challenges that OBS meets, in order to compile the big picture. The OBS principle is presented unrestricted to individual proposals and trends. Merits are openly discussed, considering basic teletraffic theory and common traffic characterisation. A more generic OBS paradigm than usual is impartially discussed and found capable to overcome shortcomings of recent proposals. In conclusion, an OBS that offers different connection types may support most client demands within a sole optical network layer.
Highlights
Optical burst switching (OBS) has been discussed intensely since its introduction
From a technical point of view, this scheme proposes that the generalised MPLS (GMPLS) control plane (CP) defines a virtual topology, which an overlaying OBS network can use to transport bursts (Figure 14)
Flow Transfer Mode (FTM) [62] is based on OBS and extends what has been proposed in PATON [29] to integrate electrical and wireless last miles in an entirely burst switched network infrastructure proposing a horizontal integration of transport options to achieve area and layer independent support for any service type
Summary
Optical burst switching (OBS) has been discussed intensely since its introduction. Celebrated as the major development in information transport technology after the invention of packet switching, recent studies on efficiency query the one-way control proposals, the just in time (JIT) scheme as well as the more efficient and today more popular just enough time (JET) scheme [1]. The efficiency is inferior to circuit switched trunks if it is used as pure underlay network connecting IP routers transporting packet streams only. This applies in both, provided transport quality and average resource utilization, and ratifies why OBS is not widely used today. The coarse granularity of 25/50/100 GHz wide wavelength divisionmultiplexed (WDM) channels can hardly be efficiently exploited by a single service This issue is solved by OBS: it provides an all-optical network alternative that combines wavelength and time multiplexing in the optical domain. The capacity of optical channels is electrically split into many digital communication channels This requires converting all signals at every node to the digital domain for routing/switching.
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