A new flexible and enhancing bandwidth utilization burst dropping technique for an OBS network

Optical burst switching (OBS) has been proposed as a competitive hybrid switching technology to support the next generation optical Internet. However, due to their one-way resource reservation mechanism, OBS networks experience high bursts (thus packets) loss rate. In OBS networks, the contention is resolved either by dropping one of the contending bursts or more efficiently by dropping from one of the contending bursts only the parts that overlap with the other bursts. In both situations, only one data source will suffer the data loss in favor to the other. In this paper, a new burst flexible and enhancing bandwidth utilization burst dropping technique has been proposed for contention resolution in optical burst switched networks. When contention occurs, any part of a contending burst could be dropped, instead of only the head or tail of bursts. The proposed dropping scheme makes bandwidth utilization more efficient and flexible. Simulation results show that the proposed dropping scheme performs better than existing burst dropping schemes.