Pre-planned optical burst switched routing strategies considering the streamline effect

Optical burst switching is a promising paradigm for the next IP over optical network backbones. However, due to its bufferless nature, it can be highly affected by burst contention. Several methods have been proposed to address this problem, most of them without considering a phenomenon unique to optical burst switched networks called streamline effect. Most of the reported studies also assume the existence of total wavelength conversion capacity on all nodes, presently a very expensive and somewhat unrealistic configuration, and additionally, the contention resolution schemes adopted increase in the complexity of the core nodes, hampering scalability. In this study, we present a traffic engineering approach for path selection with the objective of minimizing the contention considering the streamline effect and using only topological information. The main idea is to balance the traffic across the network in order to prevent congestion while keeping simple the architecture of the core nodes and without incurring into link state dissemination penalties. We propose and evaluate the path selection strategies in both networks with full wavelength conversion capability and networks with imposed wavelength continuity constraint. Results show that our strategies can outperform the traditionally used shortest path routing.