A novel access protocol for collision-free and low-latency OBS-ring networks

In this paper, we propose a novel access protocol for optical burst switching (OBS)-ring networks. The proposed access protocol is based on the scheme of locating idle time slot at all wavelengths before sending bursts. This would help to avoid burst collision and efficiently use wavelength resource. To support this access protocol, a low-cost node architecture that provides burst transmission on multiple wavelengths is also proposed. The numerical results show that OBS-ring network using proposed access protocol outperforms the ones using wavelength-based and multi-token-based access protocols in terms of mean queuing delay. In addition, it can support a larger number of nodes and high burst arrival rate compared to that of the conventional OBR-ring networks.