Quality of Service in Optical Burst Switched Networks

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) has been proposed as a promising switching architecture to support huge bandwidth requirements in optical backbone networks using Wavelength Multiplexing Division (WDM) technology. Due to its special features which combine the merits of optical circuit switching and packet switching, it can support high-speed transmission with fine bandwidth granularity using off-the-shelf technologies. OBS has attracted a lot of attention from researchers in the optical networking community.

This book provides a comprehensive discussion on the quality of service (QoS) issue in OBS networks. It examines the basic mechanisms to improve overall QoS in OBS networks as well as discusses the relative QoS differentiation among multiple service classes in OBS networks. Coverage also details absolute QoS provisioning in OBS networks, end-to-end QoS provisioning in OBS networks, and some non-mainstream research issues and future research directions in OBS networks.