Congestion control scheme based on peak load in optical burst switching networks

The most important design goal in Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks is to reduce burst loss resulting from resource contention. Especially, the higher the congestion degree in the network is, the higher the burst loss rate becomes. To improve the burst loss performance, this paper proposes a novel congestion control scheme that operates based on the highest (called peak load) of the loads of all links over the path between each pair of ingress and egress nodes in an OBS network. This paper also proposes an algorithm that dynamically determines a load threshold for adjusting burst sending rate, according to the traffic load in a network. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduces the burst loss rate significantly, compared to existing OBS protocols (with and without congestion control), while maintaining reasonable throughput and fairness.