Multipath Traffic Engineering-Based Resource Allocation and QoS Guarantees in DWDM Optical Burst Switching Networkss

Abstract

Optical networking is promising to bring a brighter future in communication systems due to its high bandwidth capacity enabled by the introduction of optical fiber technology. Due to lack of optical buffers (optical random access memory), optical switching has become the bottleneck of optical networking. This has led to optical transmission with electric switching, thus causing devastating delays. Optical Burst switching (OBS) has gained a lot of interest in research and has proved to have a great potential of solving this problem. The biggest challenge of OBS paradigm is that it suffers burst contention. A number of mechanisms such as use of fiber delay lines and deflection have been proposed to resolve contention. These mechanisms still lead to severe burst loss because they are reactive to contention. This research explores proactive mechanisms to primarily avoid contention and secondarily resolve contention. Traffic engineering solutions such as optimized multipath routing are presented as proactive mechanisms which can ease the contention problem. In a quest to achieve optimal traffic engineering solutions, key elements of OBS such as Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning and the connectionless architecture must be jeolously guarded so as to preserve the achievements of internet protocol architecture. Therefore, this research makes a case for a multipath traffic engineering solution which can guarantee QoS and at the same time preserve the connectionless OBS architecture. To achieve this, this research designs an absolute QoS differentiation framework for OBS networks. This research also develops and evaluates a traffic responsive multipath routing algorithm. Ultimately this research formulates an integer linear programming resource allocation algorithmic model which uses traffic prediction for multipath routing. The model is implemented and evaluated u sing OM NeT++ simulation tool. The results show that the burst drop probability is reduced when the developed model is used. This research is concluded by analysing the streamline phenomenon in OBS network under the new model. The results obtained show minimum effect of streamline phenomenon.