Object-oriented modeling and simulation of optical burst switching networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is becoming an interesting technology for the optical Internet, since it does not need optical buffers like optical packet switching (OPS), and is capable of a better performance than optical circuit switching (OCS). Although OBS has been recently an object of intense research, it still raises a number of important questions. Due to the high costs of an OBS network infrastructure, simulators are a good choice for predicting the behavior of this kind of networks. In this paper, we describe the proposal, implementation and validation of a simulator for OBS networks. The simulator, named OBSim, mimics the behavior of OBS networks in an object-oriented approach.