Contention minimisation in optical burstswitched networks combining traffic engineering in the wavelength domain and delayed ingress burst scheduling

A strategy for minimising the probability of contention in optical burst-switching (OBS) networks, by combining traffic engineering in the wavelength domain with delayed burst scheduling at the ingress nodes, has been proposed. The implementation of this strategy only requires an increase on the processing and electronic buffering capacities of the ingress nodes, while avoiding the use of complex and expensive optical buffers at the core nodes. The performance evaluation study has shown that the proposed strategy outperforms the burst-scheduling strategies described in the literature by several orders of magnitude, in terms of burst-blocking probability. Moreover, the performance improvements have been shown to depend on the average offered traffic load, number of wavelengths per link and maximum delay allowed at the ingress nodes.