A study of traffic statistics of assembled burst traffic in optical burst switched networks

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is considered as a promising switching technique for building the next generation optical Internet. In OBS networks, one important issue is how the performance will be affected by bursts assembled from packets, which is the basic transmission unit in OBS. In this paper, we study the fundamental statistic properties such as the burst length distribution, inter-arrival time distribution, as well as correlation structure of assembled burst traffic from burst assembly algorithms. From both theoretical and empirical results, it is demonstrated that after the assembly, the traffic will in general approach the Gaussian distribution. In particular, the variance of assembled traffic decreases with the increase in the assembly window size and the traffic load. However, the long range dependence in the input traffic will not change after assembly.