All Optical Burst Switched (OBS transport networks are often characterized by frequent occurrences of both contention and wavelength congestion. Their occurring often leads to degradations in overall network performance in handling moderate to high traffic levels, and all this leading to increases in data burst losses. Deflection routing contention resolution is quite popular in combating both types of congestions and ultimately leading to improvements in overall network throughput. However, it is necessary that network throughput always balance with effective utilization. In this paper, we propose a prioritized (indexed) cooperative based routing and wavelength assignment (PIC-RWA) scheme that reduce both contention and wavelength congestions. Performance results indicate that it significantly improves overall network performance in terms of improved effective resources utilization
