Extensive research effort is ongoing in energy-efficient Internet-based communications. Optical Flow Switching (OFS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS) offer potentially efficient alternatives to IP-router-based networks for large data transactions, but significant challenges remain. OFS requires each user to install expensive core network technology, limiting application to highly specialized nodes. OBS can achieve higher scalability but burst assembly/disassembly procedures reduce power efficiency. Finally both OFS and OBS use all-optical switching technologies for which energy efficiency and flexibility remain subject to debate. Our study aims at combining the advantages of both OBS and OFS while avoiding their shortcomings. We consider using a two-way resource reservation protocol for periodic concatenations of large (e.g. 1 Mb) packets or Media Frames (MFs). These chains of MFs (MFCs) are semi-transparent with a periodicity referred to as the “transparency degree”. Each MFC is assembled and stored at an end-user machine during the resource reservation procedure and is then switched and buffered electronically along its path. The periodic configuration of each MFC enables interleaving of several chains using buffering only to align the MFs in each MFC in time, largely reducing the buffer requirements with respect to OBS. This periodicity also enables a simple scheduling algorithm to schedule large transactions with minimal control plane processing, achieving link utilization approaching 99.9%. In summary, results indicate that implementing optical burst switching techniques in the electronic domain is a compelling path forward to high-throughput power-efficient networking.

Date Published: 11 October 2013
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 8915, Photonics North 2013, 89150B (11 October 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2034224

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8915:
Photonics North 2013
Pavel Cheben; Jens Schmid; Caroline Boudoux; Lawrence R. Chen; André Delâge; Siegfried Janz; Raman Kashyap; David J. Lockwood; Hans-Peter Loock; Zetian Mi, Editor(s)