Provisioning of Deadline-Driven Requests With Flexible Transmission Rates In WDM Mesh Networks

With the increasing diversity of applications supported over optical networks, new service guarantees must be offered to network customers. Among the emerging data-intensive applications are those which require their data to be transferred before a predefined deadline. The authors call these Deadline-Driven Requests (DDRs). In such applications, data-transfer finish time (which must be accomplished before the deadline) is the key service guarantee that the customer wants. In fact, the amount of bandwidth allocated to transfer a request is not a concern for the customer as long as its service deadline is met.