An opportunistic burst cloning scheme for star OBS networks

In optical burst switched (OBS) networks contention is the main source of burst loss. Burst cloning scheme is a proactive loss recovery mechanism that attempts to prevent burst loss at core nodes. However, at high load, burst cloning scheme leads to a significant burst loss at edge nodes due to burst queue saturation. In this paper, we adopt the burst cloning scheme with star topology, and we propose an enhancement for burst cloning scheme, called opportunistic burst cloning scheme, which aims to control the extra load of burst cloning through a simple technique to disable/enable burst cloning mechanism. We analytically analyze conventional OBS, basic burst cloning scheme and opportunistic burst cloning scheme over star networks. The results obtained from simulation confirm that our analytical model exhibits a good accuracy. The both analytical and simulation results confirm that opportunistic burst cloning scheme achieves better overall network performance than the other approaches.