A study on deflection routing in optical burst-switched networks

A major concern in optical burst-switched networks is contention,which occurs when multiple bursts contend for the same link. While a deflection routing protocol is proposed as one of the contention resolution techniques,there has been no appropriate deflection routing algorithm to find an alternate route. In this paper, we formulate a deflection routing problem based on the burst blocking rate resulting from resource contention in an optical burst-switched network. This algorithm minimizes the contention on the alternate path with the minimum distance. Furthermore, in this paper, we develop an analytical model for the deflection routing time when deflection routing is performed to resolve contention. In this model, we investigate the expected deflection routing time considering that the burst could be dropped even with deflection routing due to another contention on the alternate path. Simulations are conducted to show that there is an improvement in terms of burst loss rate and network throughput.