A New Architecture for Optical Burst Switched Networks Based on a Common Control Channel

This paper presents a new architecture for Optical Burst Switched networks featuring a novel common control channel (C3-OBS). The control plane of the network is shared and distributed, enabling better network resource planning at each node. A model of the C3-OBS OXC Node is proposed, the manageable bandwidth of a C3-OBS network is assessed and the common control channel load is evaluated. This architecture implements the "Well Informed Node" concept as a method to schedule network resource utilization. The scope and application of C3-OBS networks is studied and the implementation of Domains as a solution to its geographical extension is proposed.