Prediction and Pre-booking for Guaranteed Service Provisioning in Future Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM) Networks

Future Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks should not only support flexible resource-provisioning, but also transport various services with regulated end-to-end delay. In large-scale backbone networks with dynamic lightpath provisioning, the resource reservation overhead is high due to the latencies involved, thus limiting the capability of end-to-end delay guaranteed service provisioning. This paper proposes a traffic prediction and pre-booking mechanism to reduce the reservation overhead in traditional reactive two-way reservation protocols and consequently enhance the network performance. The proposed mechanism is investigated with regard to end-to-end delay and on blocking probability with both constant bit rate and self-similar traffic. The results demonstrate that in large networks, such as NSFNET, the proposed pre-booking mechanism is able to bring significant benefits beyond familiar Wavelength-Routed Optical Burst Switching (WR-OBS) in terms of burst/bit blocking probability and lightpath bandwidth efficiency.