Quality of service analysis for slotted optical burst switching networks

Abstract

Optical burst switching (OBS) is proposed as the switching paradigm of nextgeneration optical Internet. In OBS, IP packets from access networks are assembled into longer units of bursts allowing a lower level of switching granularity offered by the readily available optical technology. Although OBS was asynchronous in the earlier work, slotted OBS (SOBS) has recently caught the attention of the researchers due to performance gains achievable with synchronous infrastructures. In this thesis, we study the blocking probabilities in a slotted optical burst switching node fed with independent and identically distributed Poisson burst traffic and for which the burst sizes are a fixed integer multiple of the slot length. We develop a discrete time Markov chain based framework to obtain the blocking probabilities in systems with and without QoS differentiation. In particular, we study priority scheduling and offset-based QoS differentiation mechanisms for SOBS networks. The latter problem suffers from the curse of dimensionality, which we address by a discrete phase type approximation for the discrete Poisson distribution. The results obtained by using the moment-matched phase type distribution are shown to provide a very accurate approximation for the blocking probabilities. Finally, we extend our framework to analyze the hybrid priority scheduling with unity-offset based differentiation scheme which proves to outperform the others in the degree of class isolation. We show that increasing burst length has an adverse affect on the attained QoS level. We also give a quantitative discussion of the trade off between the burst blocking probability and the slot granularity. As the slot duration is decreased, burst transmissions can be initiated in an earlier time decreasing the end-to-end delay in an SOBS network with a penalty of increased burst loss probability. We evaluate the burst blocking probabilities of a classless and two-class SOBS nodes as a function of the slot length, number of wavelengths and traffic load.