Evaluating OBS by Effective Utilization

In optical burst switching (OBS) networks, bursts may be dumped before they reach their destinations due to contention. Accordingly, we classify trunk utilization into effective and ineffective utilizations used for bursts that reach and do not reach their destinations, respectively. As a benchmark for OBS, we consider an idealized version of optical circuit switching (OCS), designated I-OCS, that does not incur ineffective utilization. In this paper, we study the efficiency of OBS versus I-OCS networks for selected scenarios to facilitate the understanding of performance implications of effective and ineffective utilizations.