Thèse de doctorat
Résumé : In this thesis we provide a model for a bufferless optical burst switching (OBS) and an optical packet switching (OPS) network. The thesis is divided in three parts.

In the first part we introduce the basic functionality and structure of OBS and OPS networks. We identify the blocking probability as the main performance parameter of interest.

In the second part we study the statistical properties of the traffic that will likely run through these networks. We use for this purpose a set of traffic traces obtained from the Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya. Our conclusion is that traffic entering the optical domain in future OBS/OPS networks will be long-range dependent (LRD).

In the third part we present the model for bufferless OBS/OPS networks. This model takes into account the results from the second part of the thesis concerning the LRD nature of traffic. It also takes into account specific issues concerning the functionality of a typical bufferless packet-switching network. The resulting model presents scalability problems, so we propose an approximative method to compute the blocking probability from it. We empirically evaluate the accuracy of this method, as well as its scalability.