Grid-enpowered Optical Burst Switched Network: Architecture, Protocols and Testbed

This paper presents a novel architecture for Grid-enabled optical burst switched networks. We suggest an overall Grid network architecture and we propose a grid optical user network interface (G.OUNI) able to bridge Grid and OBS network environment. G.OUNI functionalities such as resource availability, discovery, and reservation required to integrate local Grid and OBS domains are presented. Furthermore, extended OBS protocols to support aforementioned services are being described and implemented on an application-aware asynchronous optical burst switched network demonstrator. Fully functional edge and core OBS routers as well as their algorithms and functionalities are being presented.