O/E/O storage mechanism for burst contention resolution in optical burst switching networks

Burst contention resolution is one of the most important issues in optical burst switching (OBS) networks. In this paper, an O/E/O conversion and electronic storage mechanism for contention resolution is proposed. Compared with fiber delay lines (FDL) O/E/O strategy can provide much longer and continuous delay time for the contending bursts, which can significantly reduce burst loss rate. For this mechanism, a new burst scheduling algorithm called Shortest Delay-Best Fit (SD-BF) is proposed here to improve bandwidth utilization. In a network, O/E/O can be implemented with FDL to achieve a better performance while reducing node cost. In this paper, a semi-share structure for this combination strategy is proposed to balance the cost and performance. Numerical results show that a better performance is achieved by the combination strategy in the long haul back-bone networks. We also investigate the maximum electronic RAM capacity needed in the nodes to support O/E/O storage, and how to implement Quality-of-Service (QoS) with O/E/O storage.