Improving the Performance of Optical Burst Switching with Large Control Overhead

In optical burst switching (OBS) system, the throughput decreases rapidly with increase in control packet processing time T
_cp
. The negative impact of T
_cp
will become significant as the optical fiber transmission rate increases. By analyzing the relationship between the throughput and T
_cp
, we attempt to improve the throughput. Different possible solutions are discussed. We found that using extra random offset time can significantly improve the throughput at the expense of increase in data burst delay.