A controlled deflection routing and wavelength assignment based scheme in Optical Burst Switched (OBS) networks

Heterogeneous IoT-enabled networks generally accommodate both jitter tolerant and intolerant traffic. Optical Burst Switched (OBS) backbone networks handle the resultant volumes of such traffic by transmitting it in huge size chunks called bursts. Because of the lack of or limited buffering capabilities within the core network, burst contentions may frequently occur and thus affect overall supportable quality of service (QoS). Burst contention(s) in the core network is generally characterized by frequent burst losses as well as differential delays especially when traffic levels surge. Burst contention can be resolved in the core network by way of partial buffering using fiber delay lines (FDLs), wavelength conversion using wavelength converters (WCs) or deflection routing. In this paper, we assume that burst contention is resolved by way of deflecting contending bursts to other less congested paths even though this may lead to differential delays incurred by bursts as they traverse the network. This will contribute to undesirable jitter that may ultimately compromise overall QoS. Noting that jitter is mostly caused by deflection routing which itself is a result of poor wavelength and routing assigning, the paper proposes a controlled deflection routing (CDR) and wavelength assignment based scheme that allows the deflection of bursts to alternate paths only after controller buffer preset thresholds are surpassed. In this way, bursts (or burst fragments) intended for a common destination are always most likely to be routed on the same or least cost path end-to-end. We describe the scheme as well as compare its performance to other existing approaches. Overall, both analytical and simulation results show that the proposed scheme does lower both congestion (on deflection routes) as well as jitter, thus also improving throughput as well as avoiding congestion on deflection paths.

A Node-Regulated Deflection Routing Framework for Contention Minimization

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) paradigm coupled with Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) has become a practical candidate solution for the next-generation optical backbone networks. In its practical deployment only the edge nodes are provisioned with buffering capabilities, whereas all interior (core) nodes remain buffer-less. In that way the implementation becomes quite simple as well as cost effective as there will be no need for optical buffers in the interior. However, the buffer-less nature of the interior nodes makes such networks prone to data burst contention occurrences that lead to a degradation in overall network performance as a result of sporadic heavy burst losses. Such drawbacks can be partly countered by appropriately dimensioning available network resources and reactively by way of deflecting excess as well as contending data bursts to available least-cost alternate paths. However, the deflected data bursts (traffic) must not cause network performance degradations in the deflection routes. Because minimizing contention occurrences is key to provisioning a consistent Quality of Service (QoS), we therefore in this paper propose and analyze a framework (scheme) that seeks to intelligently deflect traffic in the core network such that QoS degradations caused by contention occurrences are minimized. This is by way of regulated deflection routing (rDr) in which neural network agents are utilized in reinforcing the deflection route choices at core nodes. The framework primarily relies on both reactive and proactive regulated deflection routing approaches in order to prevent or resolve data burst contentions. Simulation results show that the scheme does effectively improve overall network performance when compared with existing contention resolution approaches. Notably, the scheme minimizes burst losses, end-to-end delays, frequency of contention occurrences, and burst deflections.