Transmission Mechanism Based on Burst Filling in Hybrid Optical Burst/Circuit Switching Networks

Hybrid optical switching networks make full use of the advantages＇ of Optical Circuit Switching （OCS） and Optical Burst Switching （OBS）. In parallel hybrid optical switching networks, edge nodes choose a swi- tching mode for traffic and no longer change. The inflexible decision making of the traffic transfer mode leads to low resource utilization when the arrival rate of the OCS traffic is lo- wer than the capacity of the light path. In this paper, a new transmission scheme is proposed to improve resource utilization for hybrid op- tical switching networks. When the traffic arr- ival rate of the light path is lower than the tran- smission rate of the light path, the OCS traffic flow is reshaped at the edge nodes to generate a series of voids. Then, several message pack- ets are sent along the light path to inform the core nodes of the voids of the light paths that represent the unused bandwidth resources. To improve the resource utilization, the voids can be filled with data bursts by core nodes. The simulation results show that the new scheme can effectively reduce the burst loss rate and improve the link utilization of the hybrid opti- cal switching network on the premise of a pro- viding service quality guarantee for OCS traffic.