Estimating Network Offered Load for Optical Burst Switching Networks.

The Optical Burst Switching (OBS) technology itself is still in the early stage of development and various studies are often performed independently, resulting in difficult comparison between individual data sets (including such controversial studies as burst/packet loss evaluation). To facilitate the future research and evaluation of OBS networks, in this paper we examine relations between standard network parameters and the resulting network offered load, creating a common ground for comparing various simulation results. Means of estimating the resulting network offered load based on parameters describing the network topology and type of traffic are developed and examined for various simulation scenarios (topologies, loads, etc.). It is argued that, given the target offered load value for a given topology, it is always possible to estimate the required idle time which had to be applied in the network nodes, in order to keep the offered network load at the pre-defined level. Keywords: Optical Burst Switching Networks, Network Simulation, Network Offered Load, Network Load Estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]