Developmental Review and Critical Analysis of Burst Assembly Schemes in Optical Burst Switching Networks

Burst assembly is a critical process in optical burst switching (OBS) networks that aggregates packets in the ingress node into bursts for efficient optical transmission. This process has a significant impact on key network performance parameters such as queuing delay, burst loss, control overhead, fairness, and resource utilization. This developmental review traces the evolution of burst assembly schemes starting 2000. This review presents a taxonomy that distinguishes direct burst assembly approaches, which are static, adaptive, quality-of-service-aware (QoS-aware), and prediction-based, from advanced assembly-enabled approaches, which include intelligent and optimization-based, in addition to cross-layer and network-aware. This critical review highlights the development, strengths, challenges, and future research directions to provide a structured foundation for advancing burst assembly in OBS networks. In its comprehensive classification table, this review also distinguishes between core burst assembly schemes, which were proposed to improve burst assembly process, and broader OBS control studies, which were mainly proposed as routing or contention resolution schemes but have an influence on burst formation. This review concludes that recent burst assembly schemes no longer focus on static conditions in the OBS network. Instead, they focus on predicting the traffic, adapting the burst size, timer, or both, and ensuring QoS in the process. The popularity of intelligent solutions is on the rise, and researchers are actively integrating and developing advanced techniques. This review helps guide future research and practical uses in OBS networks.