Signaling protocol to reduce blocking probability in Optical Burst Switching mesh networks with limited wavelength conversion capabilities

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising switching paradigm for next-generation optical Internet backbones. However, there two challenging issues on the commercialization of OBS: burst contention and limited wavelength conversion capability (LWCC). This paper proposes a new signaling protocol for OBS-LWCC networks, namely wavelength-amend-on-demand (WAoD), which is a modified version of the proposed method called delay-on-demand, to save data bursts from being dropped in resource contentions and partly overcome wavelength continuity constraint. The performance study indicates that the new protocol performs better in terms of overall burst blocking probability in OBS-LWCC mesh networks than the original one.