Optimizing offset times in Optical Burst Switching networks with variable Burst Control Packets sojourn times

In this paper, we consider the case of an Optical Burst Switching (OBS) network where the Switch Control Units (SCU) do not work at the peak rate. As a consequence, some Burst Control Packets (BCPs) will have to wait in queue to be processed, and then the BCP sojourn time will be variable. On the contrary, the optical burst does not leave the optical domain and the delay suffered is close to the propagation delay. Hence, chances are that the BCP arrives late to a given switch and, in that case, the optical burst will be dropped. We propose a Load-adaptive Offset Time algorithm (LOT) that takes into account the BCP variable sojourn time for the offset time calculation. The algorithm performs on-line calculation of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of the BCPs waiting time pdf. Our findings show that this procedure is very efficient both in terms of bandwidth usage and processing load. For example, considering a Gaussian service time for the BCPs, it turns out than less than 45 coefficients are necessary to calculate the offset time for a SCU utilization factor larger than 0.1.