A high speed protocol for bursty traffic in optical networks

An optical backbone network based on WDM (or OTDM) technology may become an economical choice for providing future broadband services. To achieve a balance between the coarse-grain optical circuit switching (via wavelength routing) and fine-grain optical packet/cell switching, optical burst switching is proposed. We study an one-way reservation protocol called Just-Enough-Time (JET), which is suitable for switching bursty traffic in a high speed optical backbone network. The JET protocol has two unique, integrated features, namely, the use of delayed reservation (DR) and buffered burst multiplexers (BBM). By virtue of DR, the JET protocol not only increases the bandwidth utilization, but also facilitates intelligent buffer management in BBMs, and consequently results in a high throughput. Both analysis and simulation results show that the JET protocol can significantly outperform other one-way reservation protocols lacking one or both of these features.