Exploring Node Light-Splitting Capability for Burst Grooming in Optical Burst Switched Networks

Burst grooming in OBS networks is to coalesce two or more sub-bursts to form a larger burst that will be switched as one unit in order to reduce resource waste and switching penalty. In this paper, we study the burst grooming problem where bursts originating from the same source and destined to different destinations may be groomed together. Assuming burst grooming can only be realized at edge nodes, we explore the light splitting capability of core nodes and mainly deal with the case when bursts in the network is too small to satisfy the minimum burst length requirement. We propose two effective burst grooming algorithms, (1) no over-routing waste approach (NoORW); and (2) minimum relative total resource ratio approach (MinRTRR). Our initial simulation results have shown that the proposed algorithms are effective in improving system performance in terms of burst blocking probability and average burst end- to-end delay.