An optical burst switched (OBS) transport network to support long-haul traffic at the core

The Internet is growing at an ever faster rate and so is its demand for network capacity. Optical switching technologies hence make use of wavelength division multiplexing to cater to this rising demand. The most promising technology of today that can support these future networks is Optical Burst Switching (OBS) that offers all-optical transmission, high-speed data rates and format transparent switching. But the current OBS architecture is very complex requiring costly fiber delay lines and quality of service management techniques.; In this thesis we propose a new OBS architecture based on photonic container switching to be deployed in the core network. We show that our architecture will solve most of the complexities of existing OBS mechanisms, and in fact will make the core an all-optical, zero packet loss network that will also guarantee equal QoS to all the users. The packets to be transmitted are actually packed in fixed size containers which will be converted into an optical burst and transmitted through the network to its destination.; Obviously a major issue to solve in our architecture is the scheduler design that will ensure zero packet loss and no optical-to-electrical switchings in the intermediate nodes. We devise a divide and conquer solution for the scheduler design problem and present three efficient algorithms for the same. We also analyze the performance of our algorithms under varying traffic conditions and network topologies to ascertain their efficiency and robustness.