Journal of Engineering Science and Technology Vol. 12, No. 2 (2017) 530 - 547 © School of Engineering, Taylor’s University 530 CONTENTION RESOLUTION IN OPTICAL BURST SWITCHES USING FIBER DELAY LINE BUFFERS SHIVANGI DUBEY 1, *, SOUMITRA DEBNATH 1 , RAJIV SRIVASTAVA 2 1 The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India 2 Scholartech Education, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India *Corresponding Author: shivangidb1@gmail.com Abstract Optical burst switching (OBS) is a circuit switching paradigm that provides very high throughput with reasonable delay. In OBS, the data burst size is not uniform and can be of any length. As the size of the data burst cannot be estimated in advance, several burst assembly techniques have been proposed. In this work, an estimation of data burst is done in advance which enable us to store the data burst. In this process, buffering of the data burst reduces average latency as well as it helps to improve the burst loss probability (BLP). Finally, the investigation indicates that the deflection routing along-with buffering of contending bursts provide an effective solution by decreasing the loss probability nearly 100 times. Keywords: Contention resolution, Markov chain model, Optical packet switch, Optical burst switch, Optical buffering. 1. Introduction In recent years, we have witnessed tremendous increase in data transfer as a result of excessive bandwidth demand by the users, which in turn requires the evolution of high-speed data transmission technology. To fulfil these requirements, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology is used, which provides more than one channel of gigabits capacity in a single fibre. In the current scenario, the network uses only a small fraction of the available bandwidth of the optical fiber. Thus, the ever growing demand for higher and higher bandwidth can be catered to by using fiber optic networks. Optical networks have two basic components: nodes and links (optical fiber), where switch is the main component of a node in optical network. Various switching techniques, such as optical circuit