Performance Evaluation of Flow Transfer Mode (FTM) with QoS and Comparative Analysis with OBS

Abstract

Demand of multimedia traffic is increasing day by day due to broadband internet access and new end-user business applications as well as the continuing paradigm shift from voice to data services. Multimedia applications require large bandwidth. Optical networks are a good choice for multimedia applications due to huge bandwidth support. Optical Circuit Switching (OCS), Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS) are some of the switching techniques available in optical networks. All techniques have some limitations and advantages over one another. OCS has round trip delay and bandwidth under-utilization issues. OPS has limitations of unavailability of appropriate optical RAM as well as output port contention, and OBS has problems of burst losses and throughput maximization. Flow Transfer Mode (FTM) is another technique which has tried to address limitations of the existing switching techniques. It is a universal switching method which classifies traffic flows into different modes. Each flow is followed by a control packet that is send in advance just like OBS. Flow can be long in case of continuous or periodic modes and small in case of burst or packet mode. Thus, it is considered as a generalization of OBS. FTM is a generic idea which has not yet been implemented or even tested experimentally. We evaluate the performance of FTM and perform comparative analysis with OBS. For this, we simulate FTM and OBS under different network scenarios. Also we propose and employ QoS provisioning in FTM and evaluate its performance with QoS. Our results show improvement in burst loss ratio, bandwidth utilization and throughput.