Optical burst switching (OBS) control architecture considers two different models for the management of the offset time in the network. The conventional OBS (C-OBS) introduces the offset time in soft-way by delaying the transmission of the burst relative to its control packet in the edge node. Another idea for an OBS architecture (E-OBS) comes from optical packet switching world and it intends to emulate offset time by means of an additional fiber delay unit introduced in the data path at the input port of the nodes. Although C-OBS has attracted lots of attention, in this paper we highlight that it possesses many difficulties that can be entirely removed in E-OBS. Issues such as unfairness in resource reservation, efficiency and complexity of burst scheduling, difficulty with alternative and backup routing, and quality of service (QoS) provisioning are studied. Moreover, E-OBS facilitates the application of several enhanced mechanisms. As an example, in this paper we analyze a QoS application based on a preemption window mechanism, which expands look-ahead processing window technique to the burst preemption context. Results show that this mechanism can achieve the performance of the conventional preemption scheme while avoiding the well-known problem of phantom burst generation.

Physical layer impairments accumulate as light propagates through a lightpath in the transparent optical networks. Therefore, it is possible to provision a lightpath, while its quality of transmission (QoT) does not meet the required threshold. Considering the physical layer impairments in the network planning phase gives rise to a set of offline Impairments Aware Routing and Wavelength Assignment (IA-RWA) algorithms. There are very few offline IA-RWA algorithms that consider dedicated path protection demands. In this work we propose a novel offline IA-RWA algorithm, called Rahyab and perform a comparative performance evaluation study, which considers two enhanced algorithms from the literature. Simulation results indicates that demand pre-processing, diverse routing, and adaptive wavelength assignment are the main reasons of lower blocking rate of Rahyab algorithm compared to the selected algorithms.

Having variable sizes offset-times is a well-known problem in conventional OBS networks. In this paper we propose and evaluate the offset-time-emulated control architecture, which is a solution similar to the one considered in OPS networks.

From the network layer perspective, the problem of burst losses is one of the most challenging problems which restrain the development of optical burst switching (OBS) networks. Indeed, OBS is a buffer-less technology and the consequent lack of guarantees for data delivery may affect significantly the quality of service (QoS) perceived by end users. To overcome these obstacles, dedicated network mechanisms and design methods are required for QoS provisioning in the network. With this end in view, in this paper, we present a traffic engineering (TE) approach to support the end-to-end traffic delivery with absolute QoS guarantees, in terms of burst losses, in an OBS network. We focus on the establishment of explicit routing paths and minimum allocation of wavelength resources in network links under the requirement that certain absolute level of burst loss probability for a given set of traffic demands is guaranteed. In this paper, we call such an off-line problem the virtual topology (VT) design problem. Since the VT design problem is NP-complete, as an alternative to the mixed integer linear programming formulation, we develop a local search heuristic algorithm to solve it. Moreover, we focus on a dynamic OBS network scenario, where the offered traffic is subject to a change. In this context, we propose an on-line VT maintenance mechanism that is responsible for traffic admission control and adaptation of the VT to traffic changes. Eventually, proposed algorithms and mechanisms for the TE-driven end-to-end QoS approach are verified both numerically and by means of network simulations for a number of network scenarios.