A Practical Approach to Optical Burst Switching

Optical Burst Switching is a promising paradigm to increase bandwidth efficiency in IP over DWDM networks. Due to statistical multiplexing, a scheduling policy is needed to solve contentions at the node level caused by more than one burst directed to the same output channel. Because of the very large bandwidth on the wavelength channels, the burst arrival rate at the network nodes is very high and therefore the time available to take the scheduling decision is very limited. As a consequence, whatever scheduling policy is adopted, it must be implemented in an extremely effective way in terms of computational complexity. This paper is focused on a cost-effective and practical solution to the scheduling problem, providing a viable approach to OBS deployment.