Analysis of the Impact of Wavelength Converters on Contention Resolution in

Optical Burst Switching

Ali Rajabi
1, 2
, Aresh Dadlani
1, 2
, Farhad Hormozdiari
2
, Ahmad Khonsari
2, 1
, Ahmad Kianrad
2
,
Hassan Seyed Razi
2

1
IPM School of Computer Science, Tehran, Iran
2
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
{alirajabi, a.dadlani, ak}@ipm.ir, {f.hormoz, a.kianrad}@ece.ut.ac.ir, seyedraz@ut.ac.ir


Abstract

Optical burst switching (OBS) appears to be the
best available solution to the ever-increasing demand
for Internet bandwidth. As a multifaceted paradigm, it
has opened up various motivating challenges in optical
networking. Several analytical models regarding
optical networking have been proposed in the
literature. However, to the best of our knowledge,
these models follow an exponential burst length
distribution which is unrealistic in the case of
threshold-based burst aggregation occurring at edge
switches. In this work, we present an insightful model
which considers constant burst lengths and study the
effect of employing wavelength converters (WC) to the
resource utilization and contention resolution policy.
We investigate two types of optical switches in terms of
availability of WCs in the switch fabric and study their
performance through mathematical modeling using the
results of queuing theory. We then further extend our
investigation by comparing these switches through
simulation experiments and thus, confirm our
mathematical model. For the purpose of tractability,
we also present an approximate model of M/D/c/K
queuing system with finite waiting room using an
M/D/1/K system.

1. Introduction

With the exponential growth of Internet traffic, the
need for wider deliverable bandwidth has become
almost inevitable. Over the past few years, time-critical
and multimedia applications that entail minimum
guaranteed bandwidth so as to satisfy time constraints
have forced a huge amount of traffic into the Internet
core. Owing to its high potential in transferring huge
amounts of traffic between distant nodes, optical
technology appears to be an appropriate substitution
for the contemporary Internet core in the years to
come. By providing almost an inexhaustible amount of
bandwidth and data transparency, optical burst
switching (OBS) seems to be a more practical
approach as compared to its other alternatives namely,
optical packet switching (OPS) and optical circuit
switching (OCS) [1-3].
Various aspects of OBS (and OPS) have been
widely investigated by researchers worldwide. Burst
aggregation methods, which play a vital role in the
performance of the entire OBS network, have been
studied deeply, and several relevant techniques have
been suggested in the literature. Among all the
suggestions are timer-based [4] and threshold-based [5]
burst aggregation techniques, the former of which
results in variant burst lengths, while the latter forces
bursts of the same length to frequently travel through
the network. Another essential parameter of an OBS
network is the employment of wavelength converters
(WCs) [1, 6] in intermediate core switches which adds
more flexibility to the resource scheduler module and
boosts the efficiency of the contention resolution
algorithm. Analytical modeling of OBS networks has
also been the field of interest of many researches [7-9].
In [9], an Erlang loss model has been proposed which
concentrates on a single switch. A more general model,
which takes fiber delay lines into account, is brought in
[8]. However, to the best of our knowledge, all these
models rely on exponential distribution of burst length,
which is far from reality especially, when the
threshold-based burst assembly technique (where burst
length distribution has almost zero variance) is
employed at the optical edges.
In this paper, we present a novel model of an optical
burst switch based on threshold-based aggregation
scheme with constant burst length. We consider a
switch and focus on one of its output links. The traffic
into the link is assumed to be Poisson, and a limited
number of fiber delay lines are associated with the link.
We show that the above scenario can be modeled
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mathematically using an M/D/c/K queuing system.
Since no accurate solutions have been previously
reported for the above queue, we present an insightful
heuristic to estimate the desired performance measures
of this queue using a similar queue with just one
server, the service rate of which is increased to balance
decrease in server count. Finally, we study the impact
of employing wavelength converters on performance
of the switch. We show that the employment of
wavelength converters greatly influences the way
available resources are utilized. Analytical models for
both cases are presented, and the performances of the
models are compared using a discrete event simulation.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows:
Section II begins with a brief introduction on basic
OBS concepts. In section III, the impact of the
employment of WCs on the resource reservation
process is described. In section IV, an analytical model
is proposed to compare the performance of a switch in
the presence and absence of WCs, followed by
validation based on simulation results in section V.
Finally, we summarize our contributions and express
the future work in section VI.

2. Preliminaries

In OBS literature, experts usually distinguish the
switches comprising optical networks into two
categories: network edge switches and network core
switches [4]. Edge switches determine the marginal
boundary between the optical network and the outside
world. Packets arriving at an edge switch are
accumulated into bursts according to their destination
edge switch. Two common approaches for
accumulating packets into bursts are timer-based and
threshold-based accumulations [4 and 5]. In the first
approach, a timer determines the transmission time of
the burst into the core network, i.e., the timer is set to
some pre-specified amount of time, after which the
burst is sent through the network. Based on the rate of
packet arrivals into the edge switch and the destination
distribution of packets, bursts might have different
lengths under this scheme, which may lead to some
synchronization problems in core switches. In the
threshold-based approach, an upper bound is set for the
length of the burst. As soon as the burst length reaches
this threshold, it is transmitted by the edge switch. One
of the most important features of this approach is equal
burst lengths that would relieve the core network from
synchronization problems. A control packet is assigned
to each burst so as to reserve the required resources for
the corresponding burst through out the core. In either
approaches used for burst assembly, the control packet
is always sent to the core network prior to the burst
transmission. The policy that determines how long
after the transmission of control packet the burst
should be injected into the core network is called
signaling protocol [10]. In Just-Enough-Time (JET)
[11] signaling protocol, the burst is transmitted at some
offset time after the control packet has been sent,
without waiting for any acknowledgement. The offset
time is chosen so that the edge switch makes sure that
resources required for the associated burst have been
reserved and the path to be traversed by the burst has
been established.
Core switches have two main functions: contention
resolution and forwarding [1]. When a control packet
arrives at a core switch, it first passes through an
optical to electrical (O/E) conversion so that it can be
processed in electrical domain. Control packet carries
the information about the burst destination. Based on
this information, the appropriate output link is
recognized and the control packet tries to reserve one
of the available wavelengths for the burst to arrive at
the switch. This type of reservation is referred to as
delayed reservation (DR) [10]. If all wavelengths are
busy, then the burst should be postponed temporarily
until one of the wavelengths becomes free, which is
done by employing fiber delay lines (FDL). FDLs are
optical buffers used to delay an optical burst for a
certain amount of time. If no such FDL is available,
then the burst will be dropped at the instant of arrival
and considered lost. After making the reservations, the
control packet undergoes an electrical to optical (E/O)
conversion and leaves the switch. When the burst
arrives at the switch, it is immediately forwarded to the
appropriate output link, possibly delayed in an FDL for
a certain amount of time, and finally leaves the switch,
provided that all required resources have been
previously reserved by control packet. Unlike the
control packet, a burst always remains in the optical
domain without undergoing O/E/O conversions.

3. FDL to wavelength allocation models

Considering a network core switch, we focus on one
of its output links. The output link is divided into w
different wavelengths, and a total of d FDLs are
associated with the output link. FDL
i
can delay a burst
for i time slots. We, also, assume that the traffic into
the output link is Poisson with rate . Furthermore, the
burst assembly mechanism used at network edge
switches is supposed to be threshold-based, which
means all bursts are of the same length, say l, and take
a constant amount of time, say b, to be completely
transmitted over the link.
We distinguish between two kinds of switches, one
of which is able to change the wavelength of a newly-
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arrived burst using Tunable Wavelength Converters
(TWC) [1], and the other which does not allow the
wavelength of a burst to be converted. Our primary
goal here is to show that the first technique results in
better performance than the second. The performance
measure of our interest is the fraction of bursts that are
lost due to contention.
Fig. 1-a depicts an output link with d = 3, w = 2
(two wavelengths w
1
and w
2
), and the employment of
wavelength converters (WCs). T
0
is the beginning of
the current time slot (T
0
, T
0
+b). Suppose that the output
link is busy transmitting two bursts of wavelengths w
1

and w
2
during the current time slot. Also, assume that
three bursts, say B
1
, B
2
, and B
3
, having the same
wavelength w
1
, arrive at the output link during the
current time slot. Since all wavelengths of output link
are busy, the arriving bursts should be delayed so that
they can be transmitted in the next slot (T
0
+b, T
0
+2b).
B
1
is scheduled to enter FDL
1
which postpones it for
one slot. B
2
can also enter FDL
1
, provided that its
wavelength is converted into w
2
since at most one burst
of a specific wavelength can be transmitted over the
output link during the next time slot. B
3
should be
delayed for at least two slots since both wavelengths in
the next time slot are occupied by B
1
and B
2
.
Therefore, it enters FDL
2
which postpones it for two
slots.
Fig. 1-b illustrates the same output link when the
time advances one slot. B
2
, which was at the first half
of FDL
2
in the previous slot, now travels through the
second half of it, and so allows other bursts, needing to
be delayed for two slots, enter FDL
2
. If in this slot
another burst, say B
4
, arrives, then it can enter FDL
1

conditioned that its wavelength does not conflict with
that of B
3
since both B
3
and B
4
are to be transmitted in
the next slot (T
0
+2b, T
0
+3b). In the case of any
conflict, wavelength of B
4
is converted. Any
subsequent arriving burst needs to be delayed for at
least two slots.
The output link, demonstrated in Fig. 1, can be
modeled as an M/D/c/K queuing system where D
stands for deterministic service with duration b; c
denotes the number of servers and equals to w, and K is
the total system capacity including buffers and service
lines. To calculate K, we notice that a burst can be
delayed for at least one and at most d slots, and at any
arbitrary time slot a maximum of w bursts may be
delayed for j slots (1 j d). Therefore, the maximum
number of available buffers is dw. As a result, K = (d +
1)w, where the second term accounts for the number of
service lines. The situation is demonstrated in Fig. 2.
The key point is that in this case, due to the presence of
WCs, all dw buffers are shared between available
wavelengths.
Fig. 3 depicts the same scenario as Fig. 1-a except
that in this case, no WCs are employed. Again, we
consider the case were three bursts B
1
, B
2
, and B
3
with
the same wavelength arrive at the switch in the slot (T
0
,
T
0
+b). B
1
is scheduled to be delayed in FDL
1
. Since B
2

has the same wavelength as B
1
and its wavelength can
not be converted, it should be delayed for at least two
slots and thus enters FDL
2
. The same argument holds
for B
3
, and so it enters FDL
3
. Now if another burst
arrives with the same wavelength as the previous ones,
it will be dropped and considered lost even though
there are free buffers available that could be used if
wavelength conversion was possible. This problem
arises from the fact that when no WCs are available,
each wavelength is assigned only a fraction of
available FDLs (1/w), i.e. wavelengths no longer share
all of the available FDLs. In other words, we can view
the system as w-combination of M/D/1/K queuing
systems where K= d+1. This situation is depicted
graphically in Fig. 4.


Figure 1-a. Three FDLs are available along with WCs.
Bursts B
1
, B
2
and B
3
, all having the same wavelength,
arrive at time slot (T
0
, T
0
+b). Wavelength of B
2
is
converted so that it can enter FDL
1
along with B
1
.



Figure 1-b. Time advances one slot. B
3
now travels
through the second half of FDL
2
. B
4
arrives at slot (T
0
+b,
T
0
+2b) and enters FDL
1
. If necessary, wavelength of B
4

is converted in order to avoid any conflict with that of
B
3
.
t
T0+b T0+2b
T0+3b
B4
B3

FDL1
FDL2
FDL3
B1, B2
B3

FDL1
FDL2
FDL3
T0 T0+b
T0+2b t
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Figure 2. A system with WCs can be viewed as an
M/D/c/K queuing system with K = (d + 1)w and c = w.


Figure 3. Three FDLs are available without any WCs.
B
1
, B
2
, and B
3
, all with the same wavelength, arrive at
time slot (T
0
, T
0
+b). B
i
enters FDL
i
due to the absence of
WCs.


Figure 4. A system without WCs can be viewed as the
w-combination of M/D/1/K queues with K = d + 1.

4. Analytical model

In this section, we present an analytical model for
the two systems discussed in the preceding section, i.e.
systems with and without WCs. Here after, we refer to
a system with wavelength conversion facility as S
1
and
a system without such facility as S
2
. As mentioned
earlier, S
1
and S
2
can be modeled using M/D/c/K and
M/D/1/K queuing systems, respectively. M/D/1/K
system is a special case of M/G/1/K [12] queue for
which precise equations of various performance
measures have already been derived in the literature.
However, to the best of our knowledge, no exact
solutions exist for the M/D/c/K system. In [13] some
approximations have been proposed for performance
measures of M/G/c/K system. A good heuristic would
be to approximate M/D/c/K with an M/D/1/K system,
the service rate of which is c times that of M/D/c/K.
Simulation results, shown in Table 1, justify our claim
that as long as we are concerned with the blocking
probability, this heuristic does quite well.
Let a
k
be the probability that k jobs arrive at an
M/D/1/K queue during a service completion, i.e. b.
Then, due to Poisson input process, we have:
( )
b
k
k
e
k
b
a

=
!
, k = 0, 1, 2,
(1)
Following the same approach as [16], probability of
blocking, P
B
, can be obtained from:
b
P
B
+
=
0
1
1 ,
(2)
in which,
1
1
0
'
0

=
(
(

K
k
k
, (3)
and
k
can be obtained recursively from the following
set of equations:
1
'
0
= , (4.1)
|
|
.
|

\
|
=

=
+ +
k
j
k j k j k k
a a
a
1
1
' '
0
'
1
1
,
0 k K-2
(4.2)
Having P
B
in hand, we compute the fraction of
bursts that are lost due to contention. We follow the
same assumptions as those brought at the beginning of
the previous section. As mentioned earlier, we can
model S
1
with an M/D/1/K system (instead of
M/D/c/K), the service rate of which is increased to
balance the reduction from a multi-server system to a
single-server one. Therefore, the probability of loss can
be obtained from (1) through (4) by setting the service
time to b/w and K = dw + 1 (dw buffers and 1 server).
To analyze the performance of S
2
, we make an extra
assumption that each arriving burst at S
2
is equally
likely to have any of the available w wavelengths.
Therefore, the input process into each subsystem in S
2

is also Poisson with effective rate /w [14]. Since all
subsystems in S
2
are equivalent and independent, and
an arriving burst is equally likely to choose any of the
subsystems to enter at its arrival epoch, P
B
in S
2
is the
same as that in one of the subsystems which is an
M/D/1/K queuing system having /w as effective input
rate, b as service duration, and d + 1 as its capacity.
Table 2 summarizes the discussion above.

w
w
dw
w
1
w
w
d
w
w
d
w
1

/w
/w
B1
B2
B3
FDL1
FDL2
FDL3
T0 T0+b
T0+2 t
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Table 2. Parameters required for computing the
blocking probability of S
1
and S
2
systems.

S
1
S
2

Effective Input Rate /w
Service Time b/w b
System Capacity dw + 1 d + 1

5. Simulation results and validation

The proposed equations have been validated by
means of a discrete-event simulation. Each simulation
experiment was run until the system reached its steady
state; that is, until no further increase in the simulation
time changed the collected statistics appreciably. The
performance measure of our interest is the probability
of loss, i.e. the probability that a newly arrived burst is
dropped due to absence of free buffers in queue.
Figs. 5 through 7 depict the loss probability versus
input rate in both systems S
1
and S
2
when b = 1.0 and
w = 4. The solid curves denote the probability of loss
in S
1
which is obtained from the M/D/1/K queue with
increased service rate, used to approximate the
M/D/c/K system, while the dotted curves represent the
loss probability in S
2
(also derived from M/D/1/K
queue as mentioned in the previous section). The dark
dots are obtained from the simulation for both systems.
It is worth mentioning that the dots for S
1
are drawn
from simulating an M/D/c/K system, which confirms
that M/D/1/K queue with increased service rate is a
perfect approximation for S
1
. Fig. 5 depicts the system
with w = 4 and d = 2 where w denotes the number of
wavelengths in the output link, and d is the number of
FDLs. Therefore, in this case, S
1
can be considered as a
queuing system with four servers and a finite buffer
accommodating at most eight bursts. In contrast, S
2
can
be viewed as a combination of four independent
subsystems, each comprising of one server and a finite
queue with a maximum of two buffers. In the next two
figures, we consider the impact of increasing the
number of FDLs on probability of loss. As illustrated
in Figs. 6 and 7, the increase in d would reduce the
probability of loss in both systems, which is obvious
when compared with the system shown in Fig. 5. In all
scenarios, S
1
performs much better than S
2
.

6. Conclusions

Employing almost unlimited bandwidth of optical
fibers, OBS seems to be a promising technology to
dominate the Internet core in the close future. In this
paper, we studied the impact of wavelength converters
(WCs) on the resource scheduling process. We showed
that the presence of WCs results in better utilization of
both wavelengths and FDLs. Using results from
queuing theory, we also presented an analytical model
for an optical switch with and without WCs. The
threshold-based burst aggregation technique was
assumed to be used at edge switches implying an
M/D/c/K queuing system. All claims were verified
using results from simulation. In future, we tend to
extend this study to generally distributed burst lengths.

0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0.35
0.4
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Input Rate,
L
o
s
s

P
r
o
b
a
b
i
l
i
t
y
S1
S2
Simulation

Figure 5. Comparison of S
1
(with WCs) and S
2
(without
WCs) systems with w = 4 and d = 2.


0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0.35
0.4
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Input Rate,
L
o
s
s

P
r
o
b
a
b
i
l
i
t
y
S1
S2
Simulation

Figure 6. Comparison of S
1
(with WCs) and S
2
(without
WCs) systems where w = 4 and d = 4.


0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0.35
0.4
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Input Rate,
L
o
s
s

P
r
o
b
a
b
i
l
i
t
y
S1
S2
Simulation
Si l i

Figure 7. Comparison of S
1
(with WCs) and S
2
(without
WCs) systems where w = 4 and d = 8.


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7. References

[1] L. Xu, H. G. Perros, and G. Rouskas, Techniques for
Optical Packet Switching and Optical Burst Switching,
IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 39, no. 1, Jan. 2001,
pp. 136-142.

[2] F. Callegati, G. Corazza, and C. Raffaelli, An Optical
Packet Switch for IP Traffic with QoS Provisioning, LNCS,
vol. 1989, 2001, pp. 315-330.

[3] I. Widjaja, Performance Analysis of Burst Admission
Control Protocols, IEEE Proceedings Communications,
vol. 142, Feb. 1995, pp. 7-14.

[4] T. Tachibana and S. Kasahara, Performance Analysis of
Timer-Based Burst Assembly with Slotted Scheduling for
Optical Burst Switching Networks, Performance Evaluation,
vol. 63, Oct. 2006, pp. 1016-1031.

[5] V. M. Vokkarane, K. Haridoss, and J. P. Jue, Threshold-
Based Burst Assembly Policies for QoS Support in Optical
Burst Switch Networks, SPIE Proceeding, vol. 4874, July
2002, pp. 125-136.

[6] R. A. Barry and P. A. Humblet, Models of Blocking
Probability in All-Optical Networks with and without
Wavelength Changers, IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in
Communications, vol. 14, no. 5, June 1996, pp. 858-867.

[7] M. Yoo, C. Qiao, and S. Dixit, QoS Performance of
Optical Burst Switching in IP-Over-WDM Networks, IEEE
Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 18, no.
10, Oct. 2000, pp. 2062-2071.

[8] X. Lu and B. L. Mark, A New Performance Model of
Optical Burst Switching with Fiber Delay Lines, ICC03,
May 2003.

[9] K. Dolzer and C. Gauger, On Burst Assembly in Optical
Burst Switching Networks- a Performance Evaluation of
Just-Enough-Time, Proc. 17th Int. Tele-traffic Congress,
Sep. 2001, pp. 149-160.

[10] T. Battestilli, Optical Burst Switching: A Survey,
Technical Report, Oct. 2002, North Carolina State
University.

[11] M. Yoo, M. Jeong, and C. Qiao, Just-Enough-Time
(JET): A High Speed Protocol for Bursty Traffic in Optical
Networks, IEEE/LEOS Technologies for a Global
Information Infrastructure, Aug. 1997, pp. 26-27.

[12] J. Medhi, Stochastic Models in Queueing Theory,
Academic Press, 2002.

[13] J. MacGregor Smith, M/G/c/K Blocking Probability
Models and System Performance, Performance Evaluation,
vol. 52, issue 4, May 2003, pp. 237-267.

[14] K. S. Trivedi, Probability and Statistics with Reliability,
Queuing and Computer Science Applications, Prentice Hall
of India, 2005.


Table 1. Results obtained on approximating an M/D/c/K queueing system with an M/D/1/K system with an increased
service rate.
D
M/D/c/K
(b=1,c=2)
M/D/1/K
(b=0.5,c=1)
M/D/c/K
(b=1,c=4)
M/D/1/K
(b=0.25,c=1)
M/D/c/K
(b=1,c=8)
M/D/1/K
(b=0.125,c=1)
0.5 0.0020 0.0031 0.0 0.0004 0.0 0.0
1 0.0213 0.027 0.0005 0.0031 0.0 0.0004
2 0.1672 0.1771 0.0133 0.0271 0.0 0.0032

2

4 0.5054 0.5062 0.1551 0.176 0.0054 0.0273
0.5 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
1 0.0019 0.0023 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
2 0.1002 0.1037 0.0013 0.0022 0.0 0.0
4
4 0.5004 0.5005 0.0967 0.1038 0.0007 0.0022
0.5 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
2 0.0555 0.0573 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
8
4 0.5001 0.4999 0.0544 0.0566 0.0 0.0


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