A Photonic Container Switched OBS Architecture with Non- preemptive Centralized Scheduler for the Core Transport Network

We propose a new high-level OBS architecture based on photonic container switching to be deployed in the core network. Our architecture removes most of the complexities of the present day Optical Burst Switching (OBS) technology and makes possible an all-optical core network with zero packet loss guaranteeing equal QoS to all users. In the proposed architecture, the packets are actually packed in fixed size containers which will be converted into an optical burst and transmitted through the network. A major challenge in our architecture is the centralized scheduler design that ensures zero packet loss and no optical-to-electrical switchings in the intermediate nodes. We present a novel divide and conquer algorithm for the scheduler design problem based on non-preemptive scheduling techniques. We also provide numerical results ascertaining the efficiency and robustness of our algorithms under varying traffic conditions and network topologies.