Anycast Algorithms Supporting Optical Burst Switched Grid Networks

In this paper we consider implementing optical burst switching as a technology for building grids with computationally intensive requirements. This architecture has been referred to as grid-over-OBS (GoOBS). First, we briefly describe the proposed layered grid architecture and show how OBS can be positioned within the grid architecture. Then, we present a generic framework for anycast routing in the context of GoOBS when requests don´t have an explicit destination address and they can be serviced by any appropriate grid resource. We also develop several algorithms to support anycasting when only a single copy of a request is transmitted. Through simulation analysis, we show the performance of our anycast algorithms and compare them with traditional shortest-path unicast routing in which all jobs have specific addresses. Our performance analysis focuses on blocking probability of requests and average end-to-end delay