Performance Of Optical Burst Switching Networks Research Articles

A Brief Review on the Methods that Improve Optical Burst Switching Network Performance

Abstract In this tutorial, we give an introduction to optical burst switching (OBS) networks and compare different methods that have been given to improve performance of these networks. OBS is an alternative to optical circuit switching and optical packet switching by separating data from control packets and sending them in a different wavelength. OBS networks suffer from an issue based on their bufferless nature, burst contentions. In these networks, when two data bursts are competing on the same wavelength, one of them is dropped and it leads to a significant reduction on the performance of the network. A lot of researches have been done to solve this problem. Some of them are addressed in this paper.

A model of QoS differentiation burst assembly with padding for improving the performance of OBS networks

Burst assembly is an operation at the ingress node of optical burst switching (OBS) networks that aggregates incoming packets from various access networks into larger carriers, called bursts. Depending on the density of incoming packets and the preset time or length thresholds, the completed bursts may have various lengths, but they must be at least equal to a minimum value ($B_{\min})$ to facilitate the switching in existing physical optical switches. If a completed burst is smaller than $B_{\min}$, it should be padded by padded bytes and it results in bandwidth utilization inefficiency. One solution to the problem is increasing the assembly time so that completed bursts must be longer than or at least equal to $B_{\min}$. However, increasing the assembly time will result in increased end-to-end delay. This article proposes a model of QoS differentiation burst assembly with padding for improving the performance of OBS networks.

Traffic Engineering in the Wavelength Domain for Optical Burst-Switched Networks

This paper addresses the possibility of using traffic engineering in the wavelength domain as a way to improve the performance of optical burst-switched (OBS) networks. With that aim, we detail a heuristic traffic engineering strategy that determines the order by which the ingress nodes of the network should search for an available wavelength for burst transmission, in order to minimize the probability that data bursts going through overlapping paths reach a common fiber link using the same wavelength. By means of network simulation, it is shown that the proposed traffic engineering strategy outperforms the existing strategies in reducing burst loss in OBS networks. This trend holds for core nodes with different degrees of wavelength conversion, ranging from the absence of wavelength converters to the use of dedicated full-range wavelength converters. More specifically, it is shown that using only traffic engineering in the wavelength domain can dramatically reduce burst loss in networks without wavelength conversion or alternatively it can reduce the number of wavelength converters in networks based on shared wavelength conversion. The simulation results also show that by combining traffic engineering in the wavelength domain with the use of the inexpensive electronic buffers at the ingress nodes, the performance of OBS networks with dedicated full-range wavelength converters can be further improved at the expense of a slight increase in the burst transfer delay.

Control-Plane Congestion in Optical-Burst-Switched Networks

We examine optical burst switching (OBS) networks with out-of-band header transmission and electronic processing. We present the first detailed analysis of the potential effects of control- plane processing limitations on the overall throughput and latency performance of OBS networks. We present an accurate analytical model that explicitly accounts for the header queuing process in core nodes, and we provide a set of design guidelines for provisioning OBS networks such that the control- plane does not become the throughput bottleneck of the system. We also estimate the minimum end-to-end latency associated with offsets and burst assembly that is required to ensure proper OBS operation. We find that ultrafast header-processing speeds (<100 ns per header) are not required for efficient OBS operation. We show that provisioning a header-offset size that corresponds to a header-processing-queue length of 50 is sufficient for a wide range of practical OBS systems. For a fully meshed network topology, a total end-to-end control latency that is 10 times longer than the duration of a single header- processing duration is required for proper network operation. By contrast, more sparsely connected networks, such as those deployed in the long haul and metro today, may require an average end-to-end control latency that is hundreds of times as large as the header-processing duration.

An adaptive load-aware burst assembly scheme to achieve optimal performance of FDL buffers in OBS networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is regarded as one of the most promising switching technologies for next generation optical networks. Contention resolution of data bursts is a critical mission to implement practical OBS. The use of fiber delay line (FDL) buffers has received a lot of attention as a fundamental but effective solution to resolve burst contention. Several studies have investigated the way to achieve the optimal performance of FDL buffers at a single-node level. However, this article studies how to achieve the best performance of OBS networks with FDL buffers under varying traffic condition at a network level. For this purpose, we propose an adaptive load-aware burst assembly (ALBA) scheme, which adaptively adjusts the size threshold of burst assembler optimized to the current network traffic load. A piggybacking method used to deliver the traffic-load information from core nodes to ingress edge nodes accelerates the adaptiveness of the proposed scheme by reducing the update time of the size threshold. The effectiveness of the ALBA scheme is proved by comparing with No-FDL case and fixed size-threshold cases under changing traffic-load environment from extensive simulation tests.

Congestion-Controlled Optical Burst Switching Network With Connection Guarantee: Design and Demonstration

A congestion-controlled optical burst switching network that offers connection guarantees was designed to handle bursts as short as 100 ms with switching within 10 ms in networks less than 200 km long. Its optical burst switching (OBS) is based on circuit switching, and transport is by optical burst paths. Five metrics are proposed for evaluating OBS network performance. The application area to be laid and the data application were determined in accordance with the design target. Given a reasonable burst block probability requirement, design criteria are developed on the basis of wavelength switching and conversion implementation. OBS network performance is tested in field trials on the Japan Gigabit Network II testbed. Fast congestion control through the use of precalculated detour routes is demonstrated.

Design of an ultra fast pipelined wavelength scheduler for optical burst switching

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is an emerging technology that allows variable size data bursts to be transported directly over DWDM links without encountering O/E/O conversion. In OBS, before the transmission of a data burst, a burst header is transmitted through an electronic control path, setting up and tearing down optical paths on-the-fly. Data bursts can remain in the optical domain and pass through the OBS network transparently. Unfortunately, system performance will be greatly degraded, if burst scheduling requests cannot be processed in time. This article quantitatively studied the negative impact of control path overloading on the performance of OBS networks. Results have shown that control path overloading greatly affects the performance of the OBS routers, especially for systems with large WDM channel counts. In order to remove this performance bottleneck, we have designed and implemented an ultra fast pipelined burst scheduler that is able to process a burst request every two clock cycles, regardless of the number of WDM channels per link. The design has been implemented in Verilog HDL and synthesized to FPGAs. Circuit level simulation results confirm the correctness of the design. The circuit has achieved 100 MHz in Altera Cyclone II devices, allowing the scheduler to process a burst request every 20 ns. To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the fastest implementation of burst scheduling algorithms.

Stabilizing deflection routing in optical burst switched networks

This paper studies the blocking performance of optical burst switching (OBS) networks using a sequential office control (SOC) state-independent deflection routing policy. We show that unprotected deflection routing may destabilize OBS resulting in higher blocking probabilities than if bursts were not deflected but simply blocked. This study was motivated by the well-known destabilizing effect that alternative routing has on circuit switching in classical telephony networks. We propose two forms of protection to guard against destabilization: 1) wavelength reservation, which is analogous to trunk reservation in circuit switching; and, 2) preemptive priority, which is a new form of protection where bursts that have not been deflected are given preemptive priority over bursts that have been deflected. Our main contribution is a one-moment reduced-load approximation to evaluate the blocking performance of OBS networks using deflection routing protected by either wavelength reservation or preemptive priority. Our reduced-load approximation relies on the usual assumptions of link independence and Poisson distributed link arrivals. We quantify the error admitted in making these two assumptions via simulation. Using our reduced-load approximation, we evaluate the blocking performance of protected and unprotected deflection routing in several randomly generated networks. The chief conclusion of our study is that deflection routing in OBS should be given some form of protection to avoid destabilization resulting from upward load variations, and in terms of blocking performance, preemptive priority is the best form of protection for OBS. We use simulation to verify that our conclusions remain valid for a realistic traffic scenario.

Separating resource reservations from service requests to improve the performance of optical burst-switching networks

In this paper, we introduce a new signalling architecture called Dual-header Optical Burst Switching (DOBS) for next generation burst-switching optical networks. DOBS decouples the resource reservation process from the service request process in core nodes and allows for delayed scheduling to be implemented. This relaxes the constraints on burst scheduling operations and allows the offset sizes of bursts to be precisely controlled in core nodes without the use of fiber delay line buffers. This allows for increased flexibility, control, and performance. To demonstrate the benefit of delayed scheduling and core. node offset control, we examine the performance of a DOBS system in which the offset size of every burst on a core link is set to a constant value. Using simulation and analysis, we show that the resulting constant-scheduling-offset (CSO) system realizes lower ingress delay, higher throughput, and better fairness than conventional single-header OBS systems, while simultaneously requiring only O(1) burst scheduling complexity. In a 16-channel system with full wavelength conversion and no fiber delay line buffers, the CSO DOBS system achieved a blocking probability 50% lower than that of a similar LAUC-VF JET OBS system. The CSO DOBS system also achieved perfect fairness, both with respect to burst length and with respect to the residual path length of bursts

Group-Scheduling for Multi-Service Optical Burst Switching (OBS) Networks

We propose a new burst scheduling mechanism for Optical Burst-Switched (OBS) networks. The new approach is made possible by gathering data bursts into groups and performing the scheduling decision for each group collectively. In OBS group-scheduling, bursts will not be considered for scheduling until a pre-defined time period elapses, during which the group of burst header packets would be gathered. By transforming a set of data bursts into a set of corresponding time intervals, the problem of scheduling these bursts is transformed into a combinatorial optimization problem. Graph algorithms are applied to obtain the maximum number of non-overlapping bursts. The proposed OBS group-scheduling scheme is shown to improve the performance of OBS networks over existing scheduling schemes in terms of burst loss probability and channel utilization. With an extension through a sequential optimization, using a Branch-and-Bound technique, the proposed scheme can support multiple classes of service. It is shown that the new scheduling approach has several desired characteristics including fairness and service differentiability among classes in terms of burst loss probability and channel utilization.

The Optical Burst Switching Ring Network using AOTF to Drop Data Burst

An optical burst switching (OBS) ring network testbed using broadband tunable Optical Filter Module - acousto-optical-tunable-filter (AOTF) to drop data burst is constructed. The service applications like file transmitting, web browsing and video on demand (VOD) are dynamically accessed and successfully demonstrated in the OBS testbed. In order to evaluate the performance of OBS network, an OBS measurement analyzer is developed and applied on the OBS ring network. The performance of the system is analyzed by operating and testing.

Hybrid switching and p-routing for optical burst switching networks

One promising switching technology for wavelength-division multiplexing optical networks is optical burst switching (OBS). However, there are major deficiencies of OBS. (1) The delay offset between a control message and its corresponding data burst is based on the diameter of a network. This affects network efficiency, quality-of-service, and network scalability.( 2) OBS adopts one-way resource reservation scheme, which causes frequent burst collision and, thus, burst loss. We address the above two important issues in OBS. In particular, we study how to improve the performance of delay and loss in OBS. To reduce the end-to-end delay, we propose a hybrid switching scheme. The hybrid switching is a combination of lightpath switching and OBS switching. A virtual topology design algorithm based on simulated annealing to minimize the longest shortest path through the virtual topology is presented. To minimize burst collision and loss, we propose a new routing algorithm, namely, p-routing, for OBS network. The p-routing is based on the wavelength available probability. A path that has higher available probability is less likely to drop bursts due to collision. The probability-based p-routing can reduce the volatility, randomness, and uncertainty of one-way resource reservation. Our studies show that hybrid switching and p-routing are complementary and both can dramatically improve the performance of OBS networks.