Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Traffic in Optical Burst Switched Network

The amount of bandwidth available on fiber optic links has increased dramatically with advances in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology. However, existing optical network architectures are unable to fully utilize this bandwidth to support future highly dynamic and bursty traffic. Optical burst switching (OBS) has been proposed as a new paradigm to achieve a practical balance between coarse-grained circuit switching and fine-grained packet switching which should result in better utilization of the available bandwidth. This paper addresses the fundamental characteristic of traffic models used in OBS DiffServ network. DiffServ provides the network the ability to differentiate between different services, while OBS provides the assembly of packets into burst which is optically switched in the core network. Three DiffServ class types that represent multimedia applications, which are real-time constant bit rate, real-time variable bit rate and non-real time traffic are studied in the paper. This paper is divided into two sections: the packet level for homogeneous traffic and burst level for heterogeneous. The main focus of this study is the average queue delay of a packet/burst waiting in the OBS system. The analytical model in support of the simulation results is also presented. The network and traffic models are developed and validated using the JAVA platform simulator.