Traffic engineering for hybrid optical and electronic switching networks

Abstract

Quality of Service (QoS) over the Internet is receiving increasing attention with growing need to support upcoming multimedia applications. Many of these applications including real-time video and audio traffic require a more robust architecture that can deliver faster response times to the service requested. The Internet infrastructure currently supports a best effort service paradigm that does not differentiate between different flows. To support future applications, this thesis proposes an approach to solve the QoS needs of the traffic the network carries, by reserving bandwidth, reducing delay and increasing availability. The issues addressed in this dissertation are two-fold, leading to a better network switching architecture to support the differing needs of high-priority and low-priority voice and data traffic. Link failure is a problem that seriously affects QoS-enabled routing. The thesis addresses this challenge by designing a mechanism to restore network connectivity and reach optimality in the event of failures, while using a variant of link-state routing protocols. The thesis applies insights from the first problem to design an improved switching/routing architecture that services the needs of both low-priority and highpriority traffic. It achieves this architecture by making intelligent traffic admission and transport and assigning that traffic to packet switching or circuit switching hardware, in this case, an IP router and an all-optical cross-connect combined in a single hybrid switch design.