Periodically scheduled burst flows in optical burst switching networks

Providing flexible Quality of Service (QoS) for multiple classes of traffic is one of the important challenges in the design of Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks. In this paper, we propose a novel bandwidth reservation scheme for periodically scheduled bursts. Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is used to construct reliable burst delivery channels across the network. Meanwhile, best effort bursts are transferred using one-way offset signaling to improve the wavelength efficiency, Our approach provides flow level QoS control without compromising the performance of best effort bursts. Simulation results show that our approach is better than early dropping schemes.