Design and analysis of optical burst-switched networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising solution for building terabit optical routers and realizing IP over D-WDM. In this paper, we describe the basic concept of OBS and a general architecture of optical routers. The key design issues related to the OBS are discussed, notably, burstification, offset-time management and channel scheduling. A simple channel scheduling algorithm called LAUC (Latest Available Unscheduled Channel) algorithm is presented, which is also called Horizon algorithm in the literature. The performance of optical routers under random and self-similar traffic is thoroughly studied via computer simulations. Our study indicates that the distribution of burst length is not exponential any more. For the FDL (fiber delay line) optical buffer, the burst loss ratio is quite sensitive to the traffic characteristic of bursts when using the LAUC algorithm.