Transmission mechanism based on burst filling in hybrid optical burst/circuit switching networks

Hybrid optical switching networks make full use of the advantages of Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS). In parallel hybrid optical switching networks, edge nodes choose a switching mode for traffic and no longer change. The inflexible decision making of the traffic transfer mode leads to low resource utilization when the arrival rate of the OCS traffic is lower than the capacity of the light path. In this paper, a new transmission scheme is proposed to improve resource utilization for hybrid optical switching networks. When the traffic arrival rate of the light path is lower than the transmission rate of the light path, the OCS traffic flow is reshaped at the edge nodes to generate a series of voids. Then, several message packets are sent along the light path to inform the core nodes of the voids of the light paths that represent the unused bandwidth resources. To improve the resource utilization, the voids can be filled with data bursts by core nodes. The simulation results show that the new scheme can effectively reduce the burst loss rate and improve the link utilization of the hybrid optical switching network on the premise of a providing service quality guarantee for OCS traffic.