Evaluation of preemption probabilities in OBS networks with burst segmentation

Abstract — Preemption techniques have been recently proposed for service differentiation in Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks. According to [1], an incoming burst with the same priority that the burst in service will preempt the wavelength if the residual length of the burst in service is smaller than the incoming burst transmission time. For a network scenario with no wavelength conversion, the preemption probability is evaluated assuming Exponential, Gaussian and Pareto-distributed burst sizes. Knowledge of the preemption dynamics at an OBS switch is a fundamental issue in performance evaluation, since the downstream switches will surely be affected. An analytical upper bound is provided, that shows that the preemption probability depends on the burst size distribution, which in turn depends on the burst assembly technique used at the network edges. On the other hand, not only truncated bursts result from preemption, as reported in other studies, but also the burst size distribution for preempting bursts is shifted to larger values. Index Terms — Optical Burst Switching, priority schemes, ser-vice differentiation, preemption, performance evaluation