The effect of burst formation timers on video streaming over optical burst switched networks

Optical burst switching networks offer the capacity needed by bandwidth hungry services like video distribution to home subscribers. This paper shows the effect that the burst formation mechanism and its parameters has on video traffic flows. The dependence among video frames in MPEG flows shows a noticeable effect on the total number of frames that the video receiver cannot decode and the duration of the video playback interruptions. By tuning the parameters of the ingress node a quality of service objective can be achieved.