| Reconfigurable Asymmetric Optical Burst Switching (RA-OBS) has been proposed as the solution to scaling Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) channels cost effectively. It supports three switching modes, namely, electronic packet switching (EPS), optical circuit switching (OCS), and optical burst switching (OBS) in the same network. This dissertation focuses on three major topics in this new area of research: in- sequence packet delivery, packet-level traffic management and integrated DWDM scheduling. In the first topic, out-of-sequence delivery inherent with traditional burst assembly in the OBS mode was identified. We proposed a novel virtual burst assembly scheme to mitigate the problem at the ingress edge router. In the second topic, we extended the virtual burst assembly scheme to support packet-level traffic management in the OBS mode. The OBS mode is more efficient to handle the majority of dynamic traffic. However, it lacks the packet-level traffic engineering mechanisms that EPS possesses. The proposed Generalized Virtual Burst Assembly scheme can incorporate any per-flow queueing policies into burst assembly to support latency sensitive applications. In the third topic, we proposed an integrated DWDM multimode scheduling scheme for the RA-OBS router. It allows wavelengths to be dynamically shared among three different switching modes and achieves constant-time (O(1)) performance. In addition to simulation results obtained from the OBS-ns2 simulator, we provided theoretical analysis of the proposed schemes, as well as implemented the proposed schemes in Altera Stratix II FPGA hardware using Verilog HDL, and tested experimentally using live video. Both simulation and experimental results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed methods. |
