OBS Networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) provides a feasible paradigm for current and future IP over optical network backbones. However its burst loss performance can be highly affected by burst contention. Several methods have been proposed to address this problem, some of them discussed in this book after an introduction to this switching paradigm and supporting technologies. In this book we present also a traffic engineering approach for path selection with the objective to minimize contention using only topological information. The main idea is to balance the traffic across the network in order to reduce congestion, without incurring extra link state overhead and considering some OBS particular effects. The routing algorithms presented here are evaluated by simulation and results show that these strategies can be exploited for end-to-end QoS provisioning.