The Streamline Effect Applied to a Pre-planned OBS Routing Strategy with Continuity Constraint

The streamline effect is a reported phenomenon unique to OBS networks wherein bursts within an input stream to a core-node only contend with those from other input streams but not among themselves. This occurrence causes contention at a certain link to be strongly dependent on the number of input streams to this link, in particular when core-nodes without converters preclude contention resolution through wavelength changes. This paper proposes a routing strategy based on the streamline effect that improves network performance by minimizing its global burst loss. Our results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the shortest-path routing while keeping simple and cost-effective the architecture of core-nodes.