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In this paper, we present a new hybrid optical burst switch architecture (HOBS) that takes advantage of the pre-transmission idle time during lightpath establishment. In dynamic circuit switching (wavelength routing) networks, capacity is immediately hard-reserved upon the arrival of a setup message at a node, but it is used at least a round-trip time delay later. This waste of resources is significant in optical multi-gigabit networks and can be used to transmit traffic of a lower class of service in a non-competing way. The proposed hybrid OBS architecture, takes advantage of this idle time to transmit one-way optical bursts of a lower class of service, while high priority data explicitly requests and establishes end-to-end lightpaths. In the proposed scheme, the two control planes (two-way and one-way OBS reservation) are merged, in the sense that each SETUP message, used for the two-way lightpath establishment, is associated with one-way burst transmission and therefore it is modified to carry routing and overhead information for the one-way traffic as well. In this paper, we present the main architectural features of the proposed hybrid scheme and further we assess its performance by conducting simulation experiments on the NSF net backbone topology. The extensive network study revealed that the proposed hybrid architecture can achieve and sustain an adequate burst transmission rate with a finite worst case delay. c © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved