Performance evaluation of optical burst switching networks with limited number wavelength conversion

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a switching technology proposed to efficiently support the growing broadband traffic over all optical WDM networks. In this paper, we analyze the blocking performance of an OBS network with limited number wavelength conversion, where only a fraction of input wavelengths can be converted to a set of (but not all) output wavelength. We have derived exact analytical results for the blocking probability for the case of exponentially distributed burst size. Analytical and simulation results indicate that by using wavelength conversion, we can improve the burst blocking performance evidently. These results also indicate that, by using limited number wavelength conversion (for example, the number of wavelengths that can be converted is seven-eighths of the total number of wavelengths), we can achieve almost the same performance as that of using full wavelength conversion.