Next generation optical networks should provide high capacity to support ever increasing traffic demands. Many technologies have been developed recently for optical transport networks to increase throughput, improve energy efficiency and simplify network deployment. One of most important problems in modern optical networks is IP traffic transmission. Although optical fibers provide tremendous throughput, the overall network performance is still limited by switching nodes. Currently there are three concepts of optical switching: circuit switching, packet switching and burst switching.
Optical circuit switched networks provide direct channels between nodes, separated by different wavelengths. It this case, channels are constantly utilized providing good throughput for transmission sessions. But for the case of low traffic intensity, throughput of optical channels will be underutilized that results in decreasing the capacity of optical transport network. On the other hand, packet switching allows to increase network performance by more effective utilizing of channels throughput. However, packet switched networks generate high overhead of signaling data, especially when traffic intensity is very high.
Optical burst switching (OBS) technology has been developed to overcome problems of circuit switched and packet switched networks by combining advantages of both switching technologies. This allows to provide good performance of packet data transmission. In OBS networks, all packets are assembling to logical bursts. Burst is a logical combination of similar packets with the same destination address and quality of service (QoS) requirements. Such approach is used to rearrange traffic from different access networks and separate it in accordance to throughput requirements and destination nodes. Burst transmission is coordinated by using burst header packets (BHP) for each optical burst. BHP includes information about addresses of source and destination nodes, QoS requirements and additional supporting data for burst transmission, scheduling and switching.
In this article, we provide a comprehensive study of data transmission in OBS networks. We address most important issues in OBS networks such as burst aggregation and effective burst size. We have conducted simulations and performance analysis of burst aggregation in edge nodes of OBS network. Obtained results shows that buffer threshold method can maintain packets transmission without losses. However, such effect is achieved by sacrifice of channel utilizations efficiency due to small size of bursts (approximately 100 kB). On the other hand, time threshold method provides much larger size of bursts (approximately 250 kB) that allows to achieve the best channels utilization. But, in this case buffer is often overloaded that result in 30% packet losses. Adaptive threshold method continuously provides buffer load around 80-90%, but rarely touches 100% limit resulting in only 3% packet losses. Moreover, adaptive method keeps bursts size around 200 kB, which seems to be enough for effective throughput utilization. In summary, we can see that adaptive algorithm promises a good tradeoff between packet losses and channels utilization. In future research, we will provide more comprehensive study on the optical switching performance, traffic aggregation process and quality maintenance in optical transport networks.