Optical Burst Switching (OBS) paradigm coupled with Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) has become a practical\ncandidate solution for the next-generation optical backbone networks. In its practical deployment only the edge nodes are\nprovisioned with buffering capabilities, whereas all interior (core) nodes remain buffer-less. In that way the implementation\nbecomes quite simple as well as cost effective as there will be no need for optical buffers in the interior. However, the buffer-less\nnature of the interior nodes makes such networks prone to data burst contention occurrences that lead to a degradation in overall\nnetwork performance as a result of sporadic heavy burst losses. Such drawbacks can be partly countered by appropriately\ndimensioning available network resources and reactively by way of deflecting excess as well as contending data bursts to available\nleast-cost alternate paths. However, the deflected data bursts (traffic) must not cause network performance degradations in the\ndeflection routes. Because minimizing contention occurrences is key to provisioning a consistent Quality of Service (QoS), we\ntherefore in this paper propose and analyze a framework (scheme) that seeks to intelligently deflect traffic in the core network such\nthat QoS degradations caused by contention occurrences are minimized. This is by way of regulated deflection routing (rDr) in\nwhich neural network agents are utilized in reinforcing the deflection route choices at core nodes. The framework primarily relies\non both reactive and proactive regulated deflection routing approaches in order to prevent or resolve data burst contentions.\nSimulation results show that the scheme does effectively improve overall network performance when compared with existing\ncontention resolution approaches. Notably, the scheme minimizes burst losses, end-to-end delays, frequency of contention\noccurrences, and burst deflections.
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