Load balancing using adaptive alternate routing in IP-over-WDM optical burst switching networks

In this paper, we address the issue of dynamic load balancing in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-based optical burst switching (OBS) networks. We propose a load balancing scheme based on adaptive alternate routing whose objective is to reduce burst loss through load balancing. The key idea of adaptive alternate routing is to reduce network congestion by adaptively distributing the load between two pre-determined link-disjoint alternative paths based on the measurement of the impact of traffic load on each of them. Through extensive simulation experiments for different traffic scenarios, we show that the proposed dynamic load balancing algorithm outperforms the shortest path routing and static alternate routing algorithms.