Performance analysis of optical burst switching (OBS) network using fiber delay line: A simulation approach

One of the key problems in the application of optical burst switching (OBS) network is to overcome the performance degradation due to contention. Contention takes place when two or more incoming bursts are directed to the same output line. This problem can be solved in time domain by incorporating fiber delay lines (FDLs) in the switch architecture. In the present paper a mathematical model has been proposed to estimate the blocking probability of an OBS network in presence of FDLs. The proposed work has further been extended to find out the effect of fiber non-idealities on the performance of OBS network. The performance of the proposed model has been evaluated using MATLAB simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that significant performance gains in optical-burst switching are achievable when FDLs are employed as optical buffers for contention resolution.