QoS-provisioning resource management schemes for practical optical burst switching network implementation

Abstract

It is widely believed that Internet Protocol (IP) provides the only convergence layer in the global and ubiquitous Internet. Above the IP layer, there are a great variety of IP-based services and applications that are still evolving from its infancy. The inevitable dominance of IP traffic makes it apparent that the engineering practices of the network infrastructure should be optimized for IP. On the other hand, fiber optics as a dispersive technology revolutionize the telecom and networking industry by offering enormous network capacity to sustain next generation Internet growth. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) as a fiber bandwidth exploring technology is state of the art. Using WDM over existing fiber networks can increase network bandwidth significantly as well as maintain the same network operational footprint. It has been proved as a cost efficient solution for long-haul networks. There are several IP over WDM network technologies, such as OCS (Optical Circuit Switching), OLS (Optical Label Switching), OFS (Optical Flow Switching), OBS (Optical Burst Switching), and OPS (Optical Packet Switching), for using enormous network capacity over existing fiber networks. Especially, OBS, one of the most promising candidates for IP over WDM transport network architectures, is illustrated in this dissertation. OBS is a hybrid approach of out of band signaling while data bursts remain in the optical domain all the time. By doing so, the processing of control information can be carried out electronically which performs a decoupling of control processing and data forwarding. However, as optical buffering technology is not mature, the use of buffers is not mandatory in OBS networks. Also, as OBS does not comprise QoS functionality essentially, the QoS schemes in OBS networks are required for implementing practical OBS networks. Therefore, in this dissertation, after a short overview of OBS, the QoS provisioning resource management schemes that achieve the serv...