Performance of Optical Burst Switched Networks for Grid Applications

This paper presents a performance assessment of optical burst switching (OBS) networks for grid applications, focusing on effective usable bandwidth and mean burst end-to-end delay for several burst loss ratios scenarios and network topologies. We show that for burst loss ratio scenarios that are not too punitive, OBS can still deliver fast and fair transmission of data between any two nodes. For irregular topologies, we also show the occluded node effect using a new set of OBS network evaluation statistics and assess the usable bandwidth for three studied topologies as a ratio of the overall network bandwidth and the effectively used resources.