Edge-Node Deployed Routing Strategies for Load Balancing in Optical Burst Switched Networks

Optical burst switching is a promising switching paradigm for the next IP-over-optical network backbones. However, its burst loss performance is greatly affected by burst contention. Several methods have been proposed to address this problem, some of them requiring the network to be flooded by frequent state dissemination signaling messages. In this work, we present a traffic engineering approach for path selection with the objective of minimizing contention using only topological information. The main idea is to balance the traffic across the network to reduce congestion without incurring link state dissemination protocol penalties. We propose and evaluate two path selection strategies that clearly outperform shortest path routing. The proposed path selection strategies can be used in combination with other contention resolution methods to achieve higher levels of performance and support the network reaching stability when it is pushed under stringent working conditions. Results show that the network connectivity is an important parameter to consider.