On the Myths of Optical Burst Switching

This paper discusses merits and drawbacks of the Optical Burst Switching (OBS) paradigm, which received so much attention by the academic research community. Since the topic is hot, and given the several flavors of OBS available in the literature, we first define what we mean by OBS. Then, we carefully design a reference scenario and a set of evaluation experiments that can be used to obtain quantitative answers to interesting questions in a repeatable way. Within this framework, we motivate our skepticism towards two frequent assertions about the OBS paradigm: its ability to (i) exploit the network bandwidth more efficiently than Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) alternatives, and (ii) to efficiently solve contentions without optical buffers.