Reconfigurable Asymmetric Optical Burst Switching (RA-OBS) technology optimizes bandwidth utilization with dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) by dynamically reconfiguring the wavelength channels into the electronic packet switching (EPS), optical circuit switching (OCS), or optical burst switching (OBS) mode. Unfortunately, although the OBS mode provides finer granularity than the OCS mode, the basic processing unit of OBS is the size of an optical burst, which is a collection of potentially thousands of packets. In this paper, we propose a novel Packetized RA-OBS network which can be considered as a consolidated approach to DWDM-based communication. More specifically, we propose an enabling technology, namely, packetized multi-mode virtual burst assembly scheme which tackles the problem from a new perspective by forming virtual bursts with no physical attachment to packets until transmission time. Regardless of the switching mode used in the wavelength channel, the proposed scheme enables full controllability of packets in DWDM networks. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that realizes packet level services in optical networks in a truly dynamic sense. We verified the effectiveness of the proposed scheme by implementing the proposed scheme in Altera Stratix II FPGA hardware and testing in an experimental optical switching testbed with real video streams, in addition to software simulations.
Y. Chen, L. Wang, S. Joshi, L. Wu, W. Chen, C. Sou, "Packetized Reconfigurable Asymmetric Optical Burst Switching - A Consolidated Approach to DWDM-based Communication," International Workshop on Optical Networking (iWON 2013), Atlanta, December 2013.
* This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers CNS-0708613, 0923481, 0926006, and the Texas Advanced Research Program (ARP) under Grant G096059. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.