Proposed OBS-based Scheme

Optical Burst Switching is a recent paradigm for optical network design. In OBS, a control packet is first sent to reserve bandwidth and configure switches along the path, followed by a burst of data without waiting for an acknowledgement of the connection establishment [1]. OBS thus belongs to the family of ``tell-and-go'', one-way reservation protocols. OBS allows the data burst to be fairly large (order of megabytes) thus reducing overhead and can allow use of out-of-band signaling for transmission of control packet. OBS relies on the the Just-Enough-Time protocol for its operation. When a burst needs to be sent, the transmitting end calculates the time $t$ required by the control packet to reach the farthest node on the path. It then transmits the control packet and after waiting for time $t$, sends the data burst. This allows just enough time for the switches along the path to configure themselves so that the following data burst is routed correctly to the destination. We now propose two alternate path activation schemes based on OBS.