A Novel Optical Firewall Architecture for Burst Switched Networks

Over the last decade, optical networks have experienced growth at a tremendous rate. The rapid increase of bandwidth demand for the transmission of multimedia data has strongly motivated this growth. As a result, optical communications are used for implementing not only backbones but also access networks. Due to the sensitivity of the applications relying on optical networks, security becomes a major concern. This paper sets the architecture of a firewall node which is able to protect Optical Burst Switched (OBS) networks against physical layer attacks. We first describe the risks threatening OBS networks. Then, we propose an architecture supporting the definition of dynamic rules in order to thwart a specific category of denial of service attacks threatening OBS networks. Finally, we propose a simulation to assess the additional delay resulting from the application of the filtering rules.