Efficient channel scheduling algorithms in optical burst switched networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising paradigm for the next-generation Internet. In OBS, a key problem is to schedule bursts on wavelength channels whose bandwidth may become fragmented with the so-called void (or idle) intervals with both fast and bandwidth efficient algorithms so as to reduce burst loss. To date, only two scheduling algorithms, called Horizon and LAUC-VF, have been proposed, which trade off bandwidth efficiency for fast running time and vice versa, respectively. In this paper, we propose several novel algorithms for scheduling bursts in OBS networks with and without fiber delay lines (FDLs). In networks without FDLs, our proposed Min-SV algorithm can schedule a burst successfully in O(logm) time, where m is the total number of void intervals, as long as there is a suitable void interval. Simulation results suggest that our algorithm achieves a loss rate which is at least as low as the best previously known algorithm LAUC-VF, but can run much faster. In fact, its speed can be almost the same as Horizon (which has a much higher loss rate). In networks with FDLs, our proposed batching FDL algorithm considers a batch of FDLs simultaneously to find a suitable FDL to delay a burst which would otherwise be discarded due to contention, instead of considering the FDLs one by one. The average search time of this algorithm is therefore significantly reduced from that of the existing sequential search algorithms.