Soft-state bandwidth reservation mechanism for slotted optical burst switching networks

This paper proposes a novel transport network architecture for the next generation network (NGN) based on the optical burst switching technology. The proposed architecture aims to provide efficient delivery of various types of network traffic by satisfying their quality-of-service constraints. To this end, we have developed a soft-state bandwidth reservation mechanism, which enables NGN transport nodes to dynamically reserve bandwidth needed for active data burst flows. The performance of the proposed mechanism is evaluated by means of numerical analysis and NS2 simulation. Our results show that the packet delay is kept within the constraint for each traffic flow and the burst loss rate is remarkably improved.