Optical burst switching (OBS) is a candidate switching paradigm for future backbone all-optical networks. However, data burst contention can be a major problem especially as the number of lightpath connections as well as the overall network radius increases. Furthermore, the absence of or limited buffering provision in core nodes, coupled with the standard one-way resources signalling aggravate contention occurrences resulting
in some of the contending bursts being discarded. In this paper we propose and analyze a restricted intermediate Node Buffering based routing and wavelength assignment scheme (RI-RWA) scheme in which intermediate buffering provisioning is implemented for contending data bursts have already propagated more
than half the network’s diameter. The aim is not to discard such bursts as they would have already utilized a considerable amount of available network resources. We comparatively evaluate the scheme’s performance in terms of performance indicators such as fairness, load balancing as well as throughput.
