Performance model for an OBS node with a shared wavelength converter pool and an FDL buffer per link

Optical burst switching is considered as a conceivable emerging paradigm between optical circuit switching and optical packet switching comprising advantages of both. Using an all-optical data plane that lacks devices to realize random access memories, the common statistical multiplexing is not possible. Consequently efficient and cost-effective contention resolution is a key issue to be addressed in order to achieve acceptable burst loss rates. Time, space and wavelength domain related strategies have been widely proposed to solve this problem. In this paper major contention resolution strategies proposed are briefly presented following an analytical model to evaluate the performance of an OBS node equipped with shared wavelength converter pool and a fiber delay line (FDL) buffer per output-link. To probe contention resolution resources minimal wavelength conversion strategy (minConv) is applied. The performance metric of interest is burst loss probability and the effects of different design parameters with respect to this metric for optimal and efficient dimensioning of contention resolution resources has been analyzed.