Analysis of a Buffered Optical Switch With General Interarrival Times

Optical buffering is known to significantly improve the performance of optical packet and burst switched networks and a number of useful analytic models for the case of Poisson traffic have been proposed previously. In this paper, the authors propose an approximate analytic model for generally distributed arrivals, specifically treating Gamma-distributed interarrival times, and show that the variance of the traffic has a significant impact on performance. The analysis is formulated in terms of virtual traffic flows within the optical switch from which they derive expressions for burst blocking probability, fiber delay line occupancy and mean delay.