Performance and Cost Comparison for Optical Burst Switching and Optical Circuit Switching

In general, optical circuit switching (OCS) provides circuit-switched nature of IP-over-WDM infrastructure. By dedicating bandwidth for each data channel, OCS is possibly able to give higher performance than optical burst switching (OBS) in blocking probability concern. This paper presents the investigation on blocking performance and cost analysis comparisons between these two switching architectures based on the same traffic demand and the same number of wavelengths applied in WDM technology. In order to enhance the performance of OBS, we apply the latest available unscheduled channel with void filling (LAUC-VF) algorithm for its resource reservation and signaling scheme. The experimentation shows OBS contributes lower blocking probability than OCS. However, OBS node cost and network cost are higher than OCS´s. The next step, we reduce the number of wavelengths together with applying some contention resolution schemes to OBS in order to make its cost comparable to OCS while providing the same magnitude of performance