Quality of Service Guarantee in the Edge Node of Optical Packet/Burst Switched Networks with Traffic Assembly

With the fast development of heterogeneous network services and applications as well as the increasing bandwidth demand, the future transport network is confronted with the requirements for flexible and dynamic service provisioning, high throughput and assurance of quality of service (QoS). To deal with the challenges, photonic packet switching aims to realize a fast switch of the traffic in the optical domain in a packet-by-packet manner. The fine granularity in the switching is flexible for the support of dynamic service requirements and allows for an efficient resource utilization by taking advantage of the statistical multiplexing gain. In last years, relatively large advancements have been made in the technologies for the fast configurable optical switch fabric. The switching control unit (SCU), however, will keep relying on electronic technologies in the foreseeable future due to the unsolved technological problems in e.g., optical buffering and optical signal processing. Optical packet switching (OPS) and optical burst switching (OBS) are two representative network architectures for the photonic packet switching. Because of the limitation in the realization technologies, QoS problems in OPS and OBS networks differ from those in conventional store-and-forward packet switched networks. Typically, due to the deficiency in the optical buffering capability, the optical switch fabric must switch on the fly, which leads inevitably to data loss. The loss performance in OPS/OBS core networks has been intensively studied. Furthermore, to alleviate the processing overhead in the SCUs, large optical data frames are suggested for the OPS/OBS core network. To this end, the client traffic needs to be assembled in the edge node before being transmitted through the core network. The traffic assembly procedure causes additional delay and alters the traffic characteristics. Its influence on the end-to-end (E2E) QoS provisioning must be elaborately analyzed. This dissertation studies the QoS provisioning in the edge node of OPS and OBS networks. It models, analyzes and evaluates the link-layer performance of the edge node and provides the solution to the admission control for QoS guarantee. In the beginning, the general OPS/OBS network architectures are introduced. Especially, the schemes for the QoS differentiation and assurance with respect to the E2E loss performance for core networks are surveyed and classified. Then, the relevant work for the edge node is discussed with the focus on the traffic assembly and scheduling. The edge node’s tasks in controlling the optical header rate and local delay are highlighted. Before proceeding to solve the QoS problems, the time-scale-dependent traffic characteristics in today’s Internet backbone are briefly introduced. To deal with such kind of traffic behaviors as well as further complex traffic patterns introduced by the traffic assembly, a novel approximate method is proposed for the multi-scale queueing analysis on the basis of the time scale