Performance Implications of Meshing Degree for Optical Burst Switched Networks Using One-Way Resource Reservation Protocols

This paper discusses performance implications of meshing degree (or nodal degree) for optical burst switching (OBS) mesh networks using one-way resource reservation protocols. The analysis is focused on the following topologies: rings, chordal rings with nodal degrees ranging from three to six, mesh-torus, NSFNET, ARPANET and the European Optical Network (EON). It is shown that the largest nodal degree gain, due to the increase of the nodal degree from two to around three, is observed for degree-three chordal ring topology, where as the smallest gain is observed for the ARPANET. For these cases, the magnitude of the nodal degree gain is slightly less than three orders for the degree-three chordal ring and less than one order of magnitude for the ARPANET. On the other hand, when the nodal degree increases from two to a value ranging from about four up to six, the nodal degree gain ranges between four and six orders of magnitude for chordal rings. However, EON, which has a nodal degree slightly less than four has the smallest nodal degree gain. The observed gain for this case is less than one order of magnitude. Since burst loss is a key issue in OBS networks, these results clearly show the importance of meshing degree for this kind of networks.