An Optical Burst Switched network architecture with passive access

This document presents an optical network architecture that considers passive access segments and optical burst switching. The architecture seeks the provisioning of very high speed end-to-end optical communications with great flexibility and efficient resource utilization while taking advantage of an installed infrastructure. We discuss the operation principles of a signaling protocol suitable for the control plane of the proposed architecture. We also present a simulation model and use it in a performance study. Our results show that the shared nature of the access segments has a major effect on utilization and loss performance, highlighting the need for improved resource allocation methods.