Impact of Linear Transmission impairments on Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks

In an optical burst switching network, the transmit data signal remains in the optical domain over the entire path assigned to it between its source and destination edge nodes. The optical signal may have to transverse a number of optical core nodes such as cross connect, fiber segments, and optical amplifiers. All these elements introduce linear and non-linear impairment effects and the data signal degrade in quality. In this paper will present the linear impairment effect, which are the amplified spontaneous crosstalk (ASE) noise from the optical amplifiers and the polarization mode dispersion (PMD) present at the optical transmission link in terms of blocking probabilities. Previous works on the optical burst switching networks assumed an ideal optical transmission path and ignore these linear and non-linear impairments. The contribution of this paper is to incorporate the impairment effects in the OBS networks.