The Agile All Photonic Network (AAPN) is a high speed transparent agile optical transport network. A key issue in these all photonic networks is the distributed scheduling method employed at the edge nodes and the manner of co-ordination with the core switching state. In this paper we compare several classes of resource sharing methods. Optical Burst Switching (OBS) and two classes of Optical Time Division Multiplexing (OTDM) referred to as statistical Slot by Slot and deterministic frame based OTDM are investigated. Performance results obtained by simulation show that the OTDM schemes compare favourably with OBS in terms of packet loss and bandwidth utilization while keeping packet delay sufficiently low to meet real time QoS requirements. Slot by Slot scheduling is suitable for MANs while frame based TDM schemes with signalling is appropriate for either WAN or MAN applications.
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