OBS Burst Assembly Algorithms Subject to Burst Rate Constraints

Control plane load stems from burst control packets which need to be transmitted end-to-end over the control channel and further processed at core nodes of an Optical Burst Switching (OBS) network for reserving resources in advance for an upcoming burst. Burst assembly algorithms are generally designed without taking into consideration the control plane load they lead to. In the current article, we propose trafficadaptive burst assembly algorithms that attempt to minimize the average burst assembly delay subject to burst rate constraints and hence limit the control plane load. The algorithms we propose are simple to implement and we show using synthetic and real traffic traces that they perform substantially better than the usual timer-based schemes.