A practical approach to scheduler implementation for optical Burst/Packet Switching

Optical Burst and Packet Switching represent two key paradigms to build bandwidth-efficient IP over DWDM networks. Due to very strict time constraints, one of the major implementation issues common to both technologies is the actual feasibility of the scheduler that is in charge of assigning transmission resources to burst/packets upon request while executing optimized algorithms for contention resolution. This paper demonstrates how a specific formulation of the scheduling problem can be the basis for a cost-effective and practical implementation of the scheduler control logic, resulting in processing times that are greatly reduced and could show very limited dependence on the traffic conditions.