Efficient control plane for passive optical burst switching network

One of the main drawbacks of classical Optical Burst Switching (OBS) solutions is the loss of bursts when contentions occur. Time-domain Wavelength Interleaved Networking (TWIN) is a lossless solution with contention resolution in the edge nodes providing a simple and passive switching in the core nodes and satisfying both low-energy and efficient bandwidth use criteria. However, this solution requires an efficient control plane. In this paper, we compare three different control planes based on either centralized or distributed schemes. Moreover we use two different slot allocation strategies (contiguous or disjoint). The performances of the proposed solutions are compared in terms of total delay, jitter, queue length and bandwidth utilization. The simulation parameters are carefully chosen to take into account implementation constraints. We find that the centralized solution with contiguous slot allocation is the most efficient and it allows a throughput up to 7 Gb/s.