Virtual Burst Assembly - A Solution to Out-of-Sequence Delivery in Optical Burst Switching Networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) has been considered the most promising optical switching technology. To the best of authors´ knowledge, this is the first paper that identifies the out- of-sequence delivery problem in OBS networks. To minimize the impact of the out-of-sequence delivery on buffer space and resequencing latency, we propose a novel virtual burst assembly scheme to eliminate the problem. In addition to simulation results obtained from the OBS-ns2 simulator, we implemented the proposed virtual burst assembly scheme in Altera Stratix II FPGA hardware using Verilog HDL, and tested experimentally using real video. Both simulation and experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.