Traffic aggregation for slotted OBS systems

In slotted systems, the traffic aggregation strategy heavily impacts efficiency and becomes even more significant in the environment of OBS architectures. One may choose to wait until a slot is filled up or to set a limit to the assembly time, so as to offer delay guarantees to QoS demanding traffic at the cost of inefficiency. When both real-time and elastic traffic must be supported, their contradicting requirements present a challenge on the slot assembly strategy. In this paper, such a slot aggregation strategy combining high utilization gain with service guarantees is presented and evaluated