A new transmission mechanism for hybrid optical switching network

Hybrid optical switching network combines the advantages of optical circuit switching (OCS) and optical burst switching (OBS). Traditional parallel hybrid optical switching networks have low resource utilization rate because of the inflexible decision of traffic transfer mode. The paper proposes a new transmission scheme to improve resource utilization rate for hybrid optical switching network. When the traffic arrival rate of a light path is lower than the transmission rate of the light path, edge nodes send message packet along the light path to inform the core nodes the unused bandwidth resource (voids) of the light path and the data bursts can utilize the unused bandwidth resource to improve the resource utilization rate. The simulation results show that new scheme can effectively reduce the burst loss rate and improve the link utilization rate of hybrid optical switching network on the premise of providing service quality guarantee for OCS traffic.