Does header length affect performance in optical burst switched networks?

Abstract

Feature Issue on Next-Generation WDM Network Design and Routing (WDMN) We investigate the effect of nonnegligible header length (HL) in optical burst switching on blocking probability. The HL is the total delay of a control packet at the controller. We first develop a model that explicitly presents the distribution of offset times as a function of the HL. Next we argue that the variance of this distribution (and not the mean) affects the blocking probability. In particular, the total blocking probability of a burst is dominated by the blocking on its last link, where its offset is shortest. We derive a lower bound for a HL threshold value below which blocking is not sensitive to the reservat..