Delay-throughput curves for timer-based OBS burstifiers with light load

The optical burst switching (OBS) burstifier delay-throughput curves are analyzed in this paper. The burstifier incorporates a timer-based scheme with minimum burst size, i.e., bursts are subject to padding in light-load scenarios. Precisely, due to this padding effect, the burstifier normalized throughput may not be equal to unity. Conversely, in a high-load scenario, padding will seldom occur. For the interesting light-load scenario, the throughput-delay curves are derived and the obtained results are assessed against those obtained by trace-driven simulation. The influence of long-range dependence and instantaneous variability is analyzed to conclude that there is a threshold timeout value that makes the throughput curves flatten out to unity. This result motivates the introduction of adaptive burstification algorithms, which provide a timeout value that minimizes delay, yet keeps the throughput very close to unity. The dependence of such optimum timeout value with traffic long-range dependence and instantaneous burstiness is discussed. Finally, three different adaptive timeout algorithms are proposed, which trade off complexity versus accuracy.