Just-in-time with enhanced fairness (JITef)

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is an architecture proposed to support broadband traffic over WDM networks. In OBS packets with the same destination are aggregated in bursts and transported through a light path established by a control message sent ahead of the burst. OBS suffers from a well known fairness problem, in that bursts with longer paths have higher blocking probabilities. In this paper, we propose a new reservation protocol, called Just-In-Time with Enhanced Fairness (JITef), which builds upon JIT to improve fairness in OBS networks, through the use of a preemptive discard strategy. JITef is also seen to achieve better resource utilization than JIT. Our results are carried out through discrete-event simulation spanning a large number of scenarios.