Cost-Effective Burst-Over-Circuit-Switching in a Hybrid Optical Network

All optical switching has been proposed as a candidate to allow high capacity networking in the future. Currently, Optical Circuit Switching has been widely deployed, although this approach is potentially bandwidth-inefficient for small granularity flows and needs relatively long set-up times. Research is being done into Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS), but these kinds of architectures are not yet able to be deployed due to the large network cost they impose. This paper tries to combine the benefits from OCS and OBS, by investigating a hybrid switching technique called burst-over-circuit switching (BoCS) where both OBS and OCS are used at a specific part in the network. First, a short summary will be provided, categorising existing hybrid ideas. Then, a simulation study will evaluate how well BoCS performs compared to pure OBS or OCS and finally the feasibility of the proposed method will be investigated by a network cost analysis.