Schedule burst proactively for optical burst switching networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising paradigm for the next-generation Internet infrastructure. In OBS, a key problem is to schedule bursts on wavelength channels with both fast and bandwidth efficient algorithms so as to reduce burst loss. To date, most scheduling algorithms avoid burst contention locally (or reactively). In this paper, we propose several novel algorithms for scheduling bursts in OBS networks with and without wavelength conversion capability. Our algorithms try to proactively avoid burst contention likely to occur at downstream nodes. The basic idea is to serialize the bursts on an outgoing link to reduce the number of bursts that may arrive at downstream nodes simultaneously (and thus reducing the burst contention and burst loss probability at downstream nodes). This can be accomplished by judiciously delaying locally assembled bursts beyond a pre-determined offset time at an ingress node using the electronic memory. Compared with the existing algorithms, our proposed algorithms can significantly reduce the loss rate while ensuring that maximum delay of a burst does not exceed its prescribed limit.