Edge node buffer usage in optical burst switching networks

Abstract

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) combines the benefits of Optical Packet Switching and Optical Circuit Switching technologies to provide an efficient, yet cost effective, method for data transmission in an all-optical, bufferless, core network. While most studies on OBS has concentrated on the core OBS network, we contribute new studies for the buffer requirement of an OBS edge node. The buffer usage for OBS systems only arises in the edge nodes since they contain an array of assemblers which combines electronic data with a common destination into an OBS burst stream for transmission in an all-optical bufferless core network. Specifically, we present two analytical results for buffer usage in an OBS edge node: one for Poisson traffic and the other for self-similar traffic input. The results show that the aggregated traffic from many assemblers inherits the characteristics of the source input traffic. This means that the output traffic approaches Poisson if the input traffic is Poisson, and the output traffic remains self-similar if the input is self-similar. These results lead to the following important design issues when dimensioning buffer requirements in an OBS edge node: if the traffic input is Poisson, the M/G/m model is the model to use for obtaining the upper bound on buffer usage in an OBS edge node; and for the case of self-similar traffic, Brichet’s method can be used to provide the upper and lower bound.