Optical flooding cluster switching (OFCS)

This paper proposes a novel framework of bandwidth provisioning based on optical burst switching (OBS), called optical flooding cluster switching (OFCS), which is developed to achieve a better resource allocation and efficiency by fully exploiting the potential characteristics of data-dominated traffic with a high self-similarity and burstiness in the modern communication networks. The concept of flooding clusters is first defined, which serves as basis of the study. The design objectives and the working principles of the OFCS scheme are introduced, where the corresponding advantages against the pure OBS, pure OCS (optical circuit switching), and the hybrid OBS/OCS architectures, are discussed. A comprehensive analytical model on the burst drop rate is formulated for the proposed scheme. To verify the analytical model and compare with the other counterparts, extensive simulation efforts have been addressed. The results reveal that OFCS can overcome the non-predictiveness of traffic self-similarity, where the flooding clusters are set up for a partial prediction of the burst arrival. We conclude that the flooding effect of data-dominated traffic can be successfully smoothed out by the proposed OFCS scheme