QoS contention control for optical coarse packet switched IP-over-WDM network

In this paper, we first introduce an optical coarse packet switching (OCPS) paradigm. In principle, OCPS advocates the enforcement of traffic engineering and control to realize bandwidth-on-demand on sub-wavelength basis while circumventing optical packet switching limitations. Based on OCPS, we have constructed an experimental optical IP-over-WDM network testbed, referred to as OPSINET. In the paper, we present the architectural design of OPSINET and its Hybrid Contention Control (HCC) mechanism aiming to satisfy various classes of loss QoS guarantees. The mechanism preventively adopts appropriate burst sizes for different traffic classes during packet burstification at ingress routers. It also reactively performs prioritized contention resolution at OLSRs in the presence of contention. Experimental results show that HCC invariantly achieves low loss probability as a result of burstification-based traffic shaping. Moreover, it provides satisfied loss guarantees for high-priority classes while incurring minimal loss degradation for lower-priority classes.