On the Transformation of Multifractal Traffic at Ingress Optical Burst Switches

Ingress nodes of Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks are responsible for assembling burst out of incoming packets and to forward these bursts into the OBS network. The most common criteria for burst assembly are based either on time or on traffic volume. The change of the statistical characteristics of a traffic stream at an ingress switch can affect the quality of service provisioning. Therefore, the statistical characteristics of the output flow of an ingress node need to be known for appropriate network dimensioning and service provisioning. This paper evaluates the impact of burst assembly mechanisms on the scaling properties of multifractal traffic flows. It is showed that the most relevant factor that determines the nature of the output traffic flow is the relationship between the cut-off time scale of the input traffic and the time scale of assembly threshold.