Architecture of a hierarchical time-sliced optical burst switching system

To overcome the need for large buffers to store contending bursts in optical burst switched (OBS) networks, a recent variant called time-sliced OBS (TSOBS) suggested that bursts be sliced and spread across multiple frames of fixed-length time-slots. This paper generalises TSOBS to allow a hierarchy of frames. Termed hierarchical TSOBS (HiTSOBS), this scheme supports several granularities of rates, and permits multiple traffic classes with different loss-delay requirements to efficiently share the network. We present an architecture for HiTSOBS, and offer it as a viable option for the realisation of flexible and cost-effective OBS networks.