Does Header Length Affect Performance in Optical Burst Switched Networks?

This paper investigates the impact of non-negligible Header Length (HL) in optical burst switching on blocking probability. The header length is the total delay of a control packet at the controller. he authors first develop a model that explicitly presents the distribution of offset times as a function of the header length. Next the authors argue that the variance of this distribution (and not the mean) affects the blocking probability. In particular, the total blocking probability of a burst is dominated by the blocking on its last link, where its offset is shortest. The authors derive a lower bound for a HL threshold value below which blocking is not sensitive to the reservation algorithm.