New assembly techniques and fast reservation protocols for optical burst switched networks based on traffic prediction Kyriaki Seklou, Angeliki Sideri, Panagiotis Kokkinos n , Emmanouel Varvarigos Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras and Research Academic Computer Technology Institute, Patras, Greece article info Article history: Received 24 November 2009 Received in revised form 24 May 2012 Accepted 4 August 2012 Available online 4 September 2012 Keywords: Optical burst switched networks Burst assembly algorithms Reservation protocols Traffic prediction abstract We propose new burst assembly schemes and fast reservation (FR) protocols for Optical Burst Switched (OBS) networks that are based on traffic prediction. The burst assembly schemes aim at minimizing (for a given burst size) the average delay of the packets incurred during the burst assembly process, while the fast reservation protocols aim at further reducing the end-to-end delay of the data bursts. The burst assembly techniques use a linear prediction filter to estimate the number of packet arrivals at the ingress node in the following interval, and launch a new burst into the network when a certain criterion, different for each proposed scheme, is met. The fast reservation protocols use prediction filters to estimate the expected length of the burst and the time needed for the burst assembly process to complete. A Burst Header Packet (BHP) packet carrying these estimates is sent before the burst is completed, in order to reserve bandwidth at intermediate nodes for the time interval the burst is expected to pass from these nodes. Reducing the packet aggregation delay and the time required to perform the reserva- tions, reduces the total time needed for a packet to be transported over an OBS network and is especially important for real-time applications. We evaluate the performance of the proposed burst assembly schemes and show that a number of them outperform the previously proposed timer-based, length-based and average delay-based burst assem- bly schemes. We also look at the performance of the fast reservation (FR) protocols in terms of the probability of successfully establishing the reservations required to transport the burst. & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Optical Burst Switching (OBS) [1] is considered a promising technology for implementing the next genera- tion optical Internet, required to cope with the rapid growth of Internet traffic and the increased deployment of new services (e.g., VoIP, video on demand, cloud computing, digital repositories, data centers). OBS aims at making efficient utilization of the network bandwidth, creating a network infrastructure that is configurable and versatile at the burst level, so as to handle the bursty traffic patterns generated by these services. In circuit switching static optical circuits are established that may not be used most of the time, leading to waste of network resources, while it also requires the aggregation of micro- flows into circuits, meaning that fine granularity and control over the Quality of Service (QoS) of individual microflows is lost. An ideal network of infinite bandwidth, would most probably use circuit switching instead of OBS, where circuits would be established between any source– destination pair, however such a network does not exists. Additionally all-optical packet switching technology is not yet mature, since packet contention and buffering in the optical domain are yet to be resolved, making OBS easier to implement in practice. Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/osn Optical Switching and Networking 1573-4277/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.osn.2012.08.002 n Corresponding author. E-mail address: kokkinop@ceid.upatras.gr (P. Kokkinos). Optical Switching and Networking 10 (2013) 132–148