QoS Provisioning for Wireless Mesh and Optical Burst Switching Convergence

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) have attracted increasing attention from the research community as a high-performance and low-cost solution to last-mile broadband Internet access. In the other side, Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a promising access technology that uses optical fiber with burst switching paradigm. In this paper, we propose a novel Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) architecture called Optical Burst Wireless Mesh Architecture (OBWMA) which integrates WMN at the user access side and OBS at the core of the MAN. OBWMA aims to combine advantages of both WMNs and OBS networks, such as large coverage at low cost and bandwidth availability. We develop an analytical model to compute the end-to-end delay in OBWMA in order to support flow requests with delay constraints. Furthermore, we propose a novel QoS provisioning scheme for the WMN part (WQP), and a novel bandwidth provisioning scheme for the OBS part (WPBP). Simulation results using ns-2 demonstrate the feasibility of OBWMA, the accuracy of our analytical model and the effectiveness of WQP and WPBP to provide QoS provisioning for the converged network.