Service differentiation in optical burst switched networks

This paper proposes a preemptive multiclass wavelength reservation protocol to provide differentiated service for Optical Burst Switched (OBS) networks. Unlike existing approaches, which may degrade to classless schemes or which may suffer from low wavelength utilization, our mechanism is robust, efficient, and supports an incremental deployment of QoS support. We maintain a usage profile for each class at the router, and implement a preemptive wavelength reservation mechanism to ensure QoS. We derive an analytical model and conduct simulations to evaluate the performance. The result shows that our approach performs the best in terms of lower blocking probability and higher resource utilization, making it an excellent QoS mechanism for OBS networks.