Buffer dumping for ring nodes in the david metro network

The research project DAVID (Data and Voice Integration over DWDM) funded by the European Community proposes the design of an optical packet switched network for the transport of IP traffic over metropolitan, national and international areas. As a consequence the interfaces between these levels need to efficiently manage the QoS. This paper focuses on the hardware architecture of the ring node in order to significantly reduce the losses caused by buffer overflow and the delay. An efficient solution to optimize buffer dumping is presented and a threshold mechanism is proposed to improve the performance of a ring node especially when the traffic is unbalanced. We have analyzed its performance and the results show the efficiency of the proposed scheduling method.