Application of Tell & Go and Tell & Wait Reservation Strategies in a Optical Burst Switching Network: a Performance Comparison

This paper deals with the comparison between two resource reservation techniques, named Tell and Go (TG) and Tell and Wait (TW), when they are used in an All Optical Network for the support of high-speed IP traffic. This comparison study is motivated considering that the modes currently under investigation for the implementation of the next generation coarse packet switched optical networks, e.g. Burst Switching, are based on these reservation policies. The comparison methodology here proposed takes into account basic parameters tied to the available optical technology and is independent of the traffic model. The figure of merit which the comparison is based on is the traffic gain defined as the ratio between the amount of offered traffic supported by the two reservation techniques under the same bottleneck link blocking probability. The obtained results provide a practical guideline for the identification of the relevant applicability scenarios of the two techniques. In particular, it shows that with the current state of art of the optical switch devices, the potential advantages of TG technique only arise in wide are networks.