On the influence of self-similarity on optical burst switching traffic

In this paper we provide a characterization of OBS traffic (burst size, interarrival time and scaling behavior) when the input traffic is long-range dependent. The analysis shows that the influence of selfsimilarity on blocking probability is negligible, since the arrival process can be assumed to be Poisson in the timescale of interest for burst blocking. However, the impact for optical buffer dimensioning is significant. On the other hand, the scaling region is shifted to larger timescales while traffic variability at low timescales is increased. These findings serve to accurately dimension number of output ports and optical buffers in OBS routers when the incoming traffic comes from a large population of Internet users.