Delay Fairness Using the Burst Assembly for Service Differentiation

Using various offset times to separate differential services is the most common form of service differentiation in optical burst switching networks. In this approach, a larger offset time is given to a higher priority burst, but it causes this burst to have a longer delay. One solution to this problem is to adjust the burst assembly time so that the buffering delay of the higher priority burst is always shorter than that of the lower priority burst. However, this adjustment causes another problem, called delay unfairness, for bursts with differential priorities that share the same path to their destination. This article proposes a new solution for delay fairness using the burst assembly.