Burst Routing Planning for Optical Networks using the Association Rule Approach

The Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a technology positioned between optical circuit switching (OCS) and optical packet switching (OPS). It is a promising buffer-less DWDM switching technology that provides high wavelength utilization. One of the critical design issues in OBS network is effective planning in minimizing burst dropping resulted from resource contention. In this paper, we attempt to adopt the association rule approach to pre-determine a suitable routing path in the OBS network. We propose the hybrid OBS routing planning with the aid of Apriori algorithm searches for the suitable routing path to reduce the transmission collision rate. The heuristic rules discovered by Apriori algorithm are stored in the Knowledge Base (KB) as references for determining the most suitable routing path. The experiment results show that the successful rates of routing paths obtained by the proposed routing planning approach can effectively improve the successful rates of transmission.