Contention resolution in optical burst switching networks: A unified study of wavelength conversion and optical buffer schemes

Wavelength conversion and optical buffer are the two most commonly used and most useful contention resolution schemes. This paper presents a comprehensive study of them in a multiwavelength optical burst switching network. Specially, we focus on 1) how does the wavelength conversion degree affect the burst blocking performance? 2) how does the optical buffer affect the burst blocking performance? Different from the studies in literature, we will not only investigate the effect of optical buffer length on the blocking performance, but also we investigate the effect of the granularity, which is defined the length of an FDLs and measured in terms of a delay unit, of optical buffers on the burst blocking performance. 3) how does various combinational schemes can be architected and how they perform.