Preemption Window mechanism for efficient QoS support in E-OBS network architecture

This paper focuses on the problem of quality of service (QoS) provisioning in optical burst switching (OBS) networks. OBS is a promising photonic network technology aiming at efficient transport of IP traffic by means of statistical multiplexing. The lack of optical memories, however, makes this operation quite complicated. Problems such as unfairness in access to the shared transmission resources, facility in adopting alternative and backup routing, scheduling complexity and so on arise in the conventional OBS architecture. In [1] we proposed the offset-time emulated OBS (E-OBS) architecture, which overcomes all these drawbacks by means of distributed provisioning of the offset time in core nodes. Nonetheless it is still difficult to guarantee a certain level of service quality. Burst preemption mechanism, which, alongside with offset-time differentiation, was proven to be the most effective technique for QoS provisioning in OBS networks. The general drawback of any burst preemptionbased mechanism is that, in case of successful preemption, either the resources reserved for the preempted bursts on outgoing path are wasted or an additional signaling procedure should be carried out in order to release them. In order to avoid wasted resources reservation, in [2] we proposed the Preemption Window (PW) mechanism which enhances the E-OBS for efficient QoS support. In this paper we evaluate exhaustively the performance of the resulting architecture showing all its advantageous with respect to other solutions.