An Efficient Network Utilization Scheme for Optical Burst Switched Networks

Introduction

With the rapid advancements in dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology, it is possible to use 80–120 separate wavelengths on a single fiber, each supporting a data rate of more than 400 Gbits/s. Nevertheless, there is a relative marginally increase in the electronic processing speed, which means that data optically transmitted would be slowed down at each node if it is switched electronically. So, it is expected that IP packet can be transported directly over optical layer without any Optical to Electrical and Electrical to Optical (O/E/O) conversions. However, both currently existing switching paradigms, namely optical circuit switching (OCS) and optical packet switching (OPS) have inherent shortcomings to support bursty traffic. OCS has low bandwidth utilization because it has a large bandwidth provisioning timescale. An OPS has a good adaptation to the bursty traffic, however, it faces two major challenges:

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  Lack of optical random access memory

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  Stringent requirement for synchronization