Sensitivity of Blocking Probability in the Generalized Engset Model for OBS (Extended Version) Technical Report

The generalized Engset model can be applied to evaluate the blocking probability at an optical cross connect (OXC) of bufferless optical burst switching (OBS) system. For tractability, previous studies assumed that burst transmission time (on-time) and time intervals between bursts provided by the same input channel (off-time) are exponentially distributed. Here we aim to study the sensitivity of blocking probability to the shape of these distributions. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that the blocking probability is not very sensitive to onand off-time distributions in general. We observe certain new effects that higher variance of onand off-time distributions may lead to better performance.