This paper explores the feasibility of deploying optical burst switching (OBS) in metropolitan area networks (MANs) as an alternative to synchronous optical network (SONET), over wavelength-division multiplexing. We present a comparison between two OBS architectures (with centralized and distributed scheduling schemes), SONET, and next-generation SONET (NG-SONET), respectively. We quantify some of the performance metrics such as end-to-end delay and loss rate when supporting Ethernet traffic in metro ring networks. Our simulation results show that OBS offers significant performance improvement over SONET and NG-SONET. In general, the OBS architecture with distributed scheduling has a superior delay performance, whereas the OBS architecture with centralized scheduling has a better loss metric.
['Sami Sheeshia', 'Yang Chen', 'Vishal Anand', 'Chunming Qiao']
Performance comparison of OBS and SONET in metropolitan ring networks