An Optical Burst Switching (OBS) network is one of the newer generations of optical networking paradigm, which is a new type of optical internet infrastructure. A burst assembly is a process occurring inside an OBS network, which gathers the packets to create the data bursts. The ingress node conducts the burst assembly by sequencing the packets arriving at the different destination queues. Based on several methods, the ingress node sends the data burst as one unit to the core nodes. Therefore,

more »

... the core nodes receive fewer requests. Although, the OBS burst assembly parameters result in traffic characteristics (e.g., burst size) which impacts on network performance. Consequently, this paper surveys OBS networks burst assembly techniques in detail. Moreover, an investigation study examining the effect of burst size on reducing the OBS network packet's loss probability is an important element affecting OBS performance which will be introduced. The study has been simulated with a number of traffic load rates, which are: incremental load, high load, average load, and low load to ensure the accuracy. The investigation results demonstrate that small burst size performs better than large burst size.