On The Control Packet Structure of Optical Burst Switching Networks

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a prospective optical switching technology that can be deployed as the infrastructure of the future All-optical Internet. OBS is still at its definition phase. Hence, no definite OBS standard architecture has been established yet, including the control packet format. In this paper, a control packet structure is introduced. The structure provides constant transmission overhead and makes the control packet scalable to higher speeds. Without adjustments, the new control packet can be used with various OBS implementations. Furthermore, a simple analytical model is used to evaluate the performance of the OBS network, based on the new format of the control packet