  This paper presents the Coded Packet Transport (CPT) scheme, a novel
transport mechanism for Optical Packet/Burst Switched (OPS/OBS) networks. The
CPT scheme exploits the combined benefits of source coding by erasure codes and
path diversity to provide efficient means for recovering from packet loss due
to contentions and path failures, and to provide non-cryptographic secrecy. In
the CPT scheme, erasure coding is employed at the OPS/OBS ingress node to form
coded packets, which are transmitted on disjoint paths from the ingress node to
an egress node in the network. The CPT scheme allows for a unified view of
Quality of Service (QoS) in OPS/OBS networks by linking the interactions
between survivability, performance and secrecy. We provide analytical models
that illustrate how QoS aspects of CPT are affected by the number of disjoint
paths, packet overhead and processing delay.
