A performance study of different OBS scheduler implementations.

Traditional optical WDM networks set up end-to-end optical connections by reserving a wavelength. Unfortunately, this coarse granularity leads to inefficient use of network resources. An attempt to alleviate these problems is Optical Burst Switching (OBS), where the packet header is sent a time Toffset ahead of the payload. The payload is then switched transparently, based on the reservation made by the earlier received header. As we will show in our study, different reservation strategies are possible, having a significant impact on the achievable throughput. We developed several alternatives, and evaluated them through simulations.