Modeling and Fast Emulation of Burst Traffic in Optical Burst-Switched Networks

In performance evaluation of optical burst-switched (OBS) networks using simulation a significant part of the simulation time, particularly in case of a network with a large number of ingress nodes, is used by the implementation of the burst assembly algorithms. This is due to the fact that each data burst is result of aggregating several short-length packets which - in a straightforward approach - have to be generated individually and afterwards "melted" into the burst. This paper presents a novel approach to fast generation of bursts based on an analytical model for both burst length and interarrival time distributions as well as an efficient generation technique (composition) supporting generation of these distributions. It is shown that the emulators developed in this work can speed up the burst generation process up to an order of magnitude while assuring a high accuracy.