Guaranteeing Long-Term Quality of Service to Real-Time Applications in Optical Burst Switched Networks

The lack of practical optical buffer technology makes quality of service provisioning a challenge in optical burst switched networks. The schemes that have been proposed to achieve service differentiation typically work on a burst-by-burst basis. Very few exploit the long-lived nature of high priority flows generated by real-time applications which are increasingly being deployed over the Internet. To effectively transport bursty best-effort traffic as well as provide definite QoS guarantees for premier real-time applications over the optical network, an optical burst switching approach with virtual slotted circuits is proposed in this paper. In this approach, the normal best effort traffic and the long-lived streams with high priority class are processed using different burst assembly algorithms and different reservation protocols. Its performance has been evaluated using simulations