Study on traffic aggregation algorithms for edge nodes of optical burst switching network

Optical burst switching (OBS) has been developed to overcome drawbacks of packet and circuit switched networks. Simultaneously, OBS allows to combine benefits of these two technologies. OBS provides circuit switching by using channel reservation for burst transmission. On the other hand, burst aggregation allows to mitigate traffic bustiness for packet transmission. Therefore, an important challenge of effective burst aggregation has emerged for OBS networks. In this paper, we study and compare the performance of three different burst aggregation criteria: time threshold, buffer threshold and our previously proposed adaptive threshold. Simulation results show that adaptive threshold algorithm provides good tradeoff between packet losses and throughput utilization.