Performance Analysis of OBS Edge Nodes for Video Streaming

OBS networks offer a highly efficient transport infrastructure for bursty data traffic. Video streaming content distribution networks are a clear candidate to use this promising technology. Traffic injected into an OBS network is a burst arrival process whose characteristics depend not only on input traffic parameters but also on design parameters of the OBS network. The properties of this traffic will dictate how it is affected by transmision over the OBS core and thus the user-perceived quality of the video stream that is delivered at the edge of the network. This paper evaluates different parameters in the ingress node that affect the losses suffered by the input traffic. Rules for the optimum selection of these parameters are presented: number of wavelengths, buffer size, timer value. The results show the strong dependence of losses on the timer value selected at the burst creation node.