Deflection Routing for Optical Bursts Considering Possibility of Contention at Downstream Nodes

Deflection routing is one of the promising approaches to resolve contention in the optical burst switching networks. In the conventional deflection routing scheme, optical bursts may be unable to traverse the route evaluated to select an outgoing link because of the contention at succeeding downstream transit nodes. As a result, the optical bursts may traverse a different route resulting in a long distance or decreased performance. This paper proposes a deflection routing scheme that considers the possibility of the contention at downstream nodes. This scheme utilizes the expected route distance instead of the static route distance toward a destination node. The expected route distance considers the possibility of contention at each downstream transit node and is calculated using measured link blocking probabilities at each downstream transit node. The selection priority of each outgoing link is given dynamically based on its expected route distance toward a destination node. By considering the possibility of contention at downstream nodes, a routing scheme with high performance can be realized. The loss rate of optical bursts is improved when an imbalanced load is applied to the network, and the loss rate of optical bursts is also improved when the network includes links with extremely different distances.