Abstract: This paper studies the routing algorithm in an Optical Burst Switching(OBS) network. Generally, the shortest path between the source-destination paris is used as the route of the bursts, which may lead to unbalanced link load in an unsymmetrical network and deteriorate the network performance dramatically in the context of one-way reservation protocol adopted by OBS. A probability based routing algorithm is proposed. For every source-destination pair, different weights are assigned to the links. The switching node will select the output link of the coming bursts proportional to their weights. The weights of different source-destination pairs at different links are decided by a non-linear programming. Simulation results show that our routing algorithm can obviously decrease the burst blocking probability in an unsymmetrical network compared with the shortest-path routing algorithms.

Key words: OBS, routing algorithm, non-linear programming, probability