Demonstration of dynamic application-aware labelled optical burst switched network

Abstract

The first demonstration of a dynamic application-aware labelled optical burst switched network is reported. With the implementation of three novel mechanisms, i.e. dynamic session initiation protocol peer-topeer hybrid resource discovery and management, dynamic end-toend label switched path setup and dynamic offset time, the network can support various emerging applications with high efficiency and scalability.Introduction: Apart from purely theoretical research, studies on experimental prototypes and testbeds have been crucial and challenging steps towards achieving practical optical burst switched (OBS) networks. To date, several OBS testbeds have been developed and demonstrated around the world [1-3]. However, a new generation of applications is emerging that make increasing demands on the network, not only for network resource (e.g. bandwidth) but also for discovery and management non-network resource (e.g. storage, computational and instrumentation resources) as part of the network service offered. According to the number of potential users and job frequency, these new applications can be further divided into two types. The first is a scientific/business oriented application, which is only open to a few specific users with a low job frequency. Such applications include high energy particle physics, very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), high performance computing and visualisation, scientific collaboration, etc. The second is a consumer oriented application, which may attract a very large number of users with a high job frequency. Examples of such applications could be e-health, high-definition interactive TV, home video editing, real-time rendering and consumer grids, etc. As these applications evolve, there is an increasing need for an adaptive and efficient network infrastructure able to support all these application types, and provide efficient and scalable resource discovery and management capability.To address this issue, two novel OBS network scenarios have been proposed and demonstrated in recent years, including the session initiation protocol (SIP)-based OBS network [4,5] and the peer-topeer (P2P)-based OBS network [6,7], which utilise the SIP or P2P protocol to negotiate and manage the application sessions (i.e. non-network resource discovery and allocation) and OBS signalling to reserve optical network resource and manage the physical layer connections. However, as analysed in [8], the SIP-based OBS network proposed in [4,5] is only suitable for the first type of application mentioned above and it cannot address the requirements of the second application for the poor scalability and fault-tolerance of the client-server model. In contrast, the P2P-based OBS network [6,7] can provide an efficient and scalable resource discovery and management capability for the consumer oriented application, but it is not efficient for the first application owing to the high signalling overhead of the P2P protocol. Therefore, in order to efficiently support various emerging applications, a promising solution is ...