An adaptive loss-aware flow control scheme for delay-sensitive applications in OBS networks

Abstract

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is one of the most promising switching technologies for next generation optical networks. As delay-sensitive applications such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP) have recently become popular, OBS networks should guarantee stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for such applications. Thus, this paper proposes an Adaptive Loss-aware Flow Control (ALFC) scheme, which adaptively decides on the burst offset time based on loss-rate information delivered from core nodes for assigning a high priority to delay-sensitive application traffic. The proposed ALFC scheme also controls the upper-bounds of the factors inducing delay and jitter for guaranteeing the delay and jitter requirements of delay-sensitive application traffic. Moreover, a piggybacking method used in the proposed scheme accelerates the guarantee of the loss, delay, and jitter requirements because the response time for. flow control can be extremely reduced up to a quarter of the Round Trip Time (RTT) on average while minimizing the signaling overhead. Simulation results show that our mechanism can guarantee a 10(-3) loss-rate under any traffic load while offering satisfactory levels of delay and jitter for delay-sensitive applications.