Quality of Service in Asynchronous Bufferless Optical Packet Switched Networks

Optical Packet Switching (OPS) is a promising technology for future core networks due to the ability to handle bursty traffic, adaptability to changes in the network infrastructure and good network utilization. In order to provide sufficient Quality of Service (QoS) to the emerging range of real-time and critical business applications, service differentiation should be present in future OPS. This paper presents the Preemptive Drop Policy (PDP), which provides service differentiation in asynchronous bufferless OPS. Based on time-continuous Markov chains, we introduce an analytical model of the PDP for switches with and without wavelength conversion. We extend the PDP into the Adaptive PDP (APDP), which provides absolute QoS guarantees in OPS. Simulations performed validate our analytical model and show that the APDP operates properly in a dynamic changing system load scenario.