Optical CDMA Networks: Principles, Analysis and Applications

Chapter 10

Services Differentiation and Quality of Services in Optical CDMA Networks

10.1 Introduction

The Internet of the future requires higher bit rate and ultrafast services such as streaming over the Internet protocol (IP) like video-on-demand and IPTV. Due to its tremendous resources of bandwidth and extremely low loss, fibre-optic can be the best physical transmission medium for telecommunications and computer networks. Among optical access technologies, we need to pick the most suitable one that can make full use of the large bandwidth in the fibre-optic. Meanwhile, it has to have the potential to support random access protocols, different services with different data rates (i.e. differentiated services—DiffServ) with bursty traffic behaviours such as IP traffic.

Label switched paths could be used via the routing to establish end-to-end paths. Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is a switching protocol between Layers 2 and 3, adding labels in packet headers and forwarding labelled packets in corresponding paths using switching instead of routing; see Chapter 9 for more details. This transmission is an identical performance to that of the optical CDMA (OCDMA) concept, providing that it is utilized as a network access protocol since it has the potential to support label switching. Major applications of MPLS are network traffic engineering. Generalized MPLS (GMPLS) extends MPLS to add a signalling and routing control plane for devices in the packet domain, time domain, wavelength ...