Quality of service strategy in an optical packet network with multi-class frame-based scheduling

We propose and test a novel distributed strategy for providing QoS differentiation in an optical packet metro-network with star topology, which represents a compromise between simplicity and performance. In particular, two traffic classes are considered, namely high quality, for loss-sensitive and limited delay applications, and best effort. A frame-based scheduling algorithm has been adapted to handle the two classes of traffic and is applied to arbitrate packets in a non-conflicting manner. QoS provision is delivered by a centralised scheduling algorithm and by handling switching request opportunities in the network edge nodes. A real scale network is evaluated by simulation in order to assess the merits of our solution.