Optimal timeslot size for synchronous optical burst switching

Traditional Optical Burst Switching (OBS) protocols assume that data bursts arrive at a given node asynchronously and that burst size varies, which causes a relatively inefficient utilization of the outgoing wavelengths. Time-Synchronized Optical Burst Switching (SynOBS) was proposed to overcome this ineffective resource utilization by utilizing a synchronized timeslot-based mechanism in the OBS network. However, while synchronization improves resource utilization over traditional OBS, the system must be carefully designed in order to achieve the best performance possible. This paper investigates the effect of timeslot size on the performance of SynOBS and proposes an analytical framework for approximating the optimal solution, based on the network configuration and input traffic characteristics.