Self-similar traffic shaping at the edge router in optical packet-switched networks

Traffic shaping at the edge router is one possible solution to mitigate the adverse effects of self-similar traffic in optical packet-switched networks. In this paper we propose an optical packet assembly mechanism and study its impacts on the traffic characteristics. In addition to the Hurst parameter, we apply new measures to describe the short-term correlation and to investigate the effect of the system parameters in the assembly mechanism. Our simulation study indicates that this assembly mechanism can reduce the traffic correlation and the degree of self-similarity at an acceptable latency in terms of the assembly delay.