Burst switching architecture for a video-on-demand server

摘要

Modern optical transmission technology using wavelength division multiplexing can support aggregate transmission speeds on the order of hundreds of gigabits per second, but photonic switching speeds are relatively more constrained at the present time. Burst switching has recently been proposed as a solution, where long segments of data with identical destinations and quality-of-service objectives are handled together as unified switchable entities. In this paper we examine application of this concept to video-on-demand servers, and analyze the performance. A burst-switching distributed-server architecture is proposed. It is shown that the switch performance may be enhanced by using recent concepts of bifurcated input queueing switches.