Abstract: Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising paradigm of the next-generation internet infrastructure. In this paper a variance-time-based analysis method is proposed, based on the analysis of the convergence mechanism in the OBS edge node. By sampling from the traffic flow and averaging non-overlapping blocks of size m from the original series, the variance asymptotic characteristic of the averaged series is obtained, from which this method shows that the splitting, assembling and merging process of the convergence mechanism will not change the Hurst parmeter of the traffic if the queue length of assemble buffer has a finite second-order moment. A simulation model of the OBS edge node is established, on which the correctness of analysis is testified. From both theoretical and simulation results, it is demonstrated that the self-similarity of the traffic after convergence is the same as that of the input traffic and has nothing to do with the assemble algorithm.

Key words: optical burst switching, burst convergence, self-similar traffic