Impact of Edge Traffic Aggregation on the Performance of FDL-Assisted Optical Core Switching Nodes

In this paper we consider optical burst/packet switching networks with core nodes in which contentions are resolved by means of a hybrid scheme incorporating FDL buffering and wavelength conversion. For such a network we investigate the influence of traffic shaping at the edge nodes, as introduced by optical burst generation algorithms, on the packet drop rate at the core nodes. In particular we focus our attention on the impact of the algorithms that generate fixed-size optical bursts, i.e., volume-based burst assembly. The simulative investigation reveals that the total number of burst flows multiplexed at the core node under consideration as well as the assembly threshold are the two most influential factors, and that the influence of these factors on the drop rate could be as high as several orders of magnitude. Additionally, it is discussed that the assembly process can negatively influence the performance of the so-called void-filling channel scheduling algorithms.