Does header length affect performance in optical burst switched networks?

We investigate the effect of nonnegligible header length (HL) in optical burst switching on blocking probability. The HL is the total delay of a control packet at the controller. We first develop a model that explicitly presents the distribution of offset times as a function of the HL. Next we argue that the variance of this distribution (and not the mean) affects the blocking probability. In particular, the total blocking probability of a burst is dominated by the blocking on its last link, where its offset is shortest. We derive a lower bound for a HL threshold value below which blocking is not sensitive to the reservation algorithm. This threshold depends on network connectivity, number of channels per fiber, and burst length. The blocking probabilities of both the just enough time and the horizon reservation algorithms were empirically found not to be very sensitive to the distribution of burst sizes.