A study on traffic engineering mechanisms for QoS provisioning in optical brust switching networks

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 revolutionizes the telecom and networking industry by offering enormous network capacity to sustain next generation Internet growth. WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) 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 main tain the same network operational footprint. It has been proved as a cost efficient solution for long-haul networks. This trend towards an IP-over-WDM-based transport network architecture is driven by (i) the evolution of the photonic layer, (ii) the need for a higher dynamic in provisioning of bandwidth and (iii) the need for cost reduction in the core. Hereby, enhanced photonic components as well as the ability to transmit photonic signals for thousands of kilometers without regeneration allow thinking about photonic networking. In this thesis, the above mentioned evolution towards an IP-over-WDM-based transport network architecture is discussed and standardization efforts are highlighted. Optical burst switching, OBS, is one promising candidate of such a transport network architecture which realizes a hybrid approach of out of band signaling while data remains in the photonic domain all the time. By doing so, processing of header information can be carried out electronically which performs a decoupling of header processing and data forwarding. However, as the use of buffers is not mandatory for OBS and OBS does not comprise QoS functionality, an OBS-QoS mechanism is required w...