Patent ID: 8902916

Claim:
A method of burst switching in a communication network having a plurality of core switching nodes and a plurality of edge nodes, each core switching node comprising at least one optical switch having no traffic buffers, the method comprising: receiving, from an edge node at a selected core switching node, a bit rate allocation request specifying a destination edge node; generating, by the selected core switching node in response to the bit allocation request, at least one burst transfer permit, each burst transfer permit specifying a respective permissible burst size, an inter-burst interval and the destination edge node, the respective permissible burst size having: an upper bound constrained by a maximum jitter tolerance of data constituting data bursts received from the edge node; and a lower bound much larger than a time required for reconfiguring the at least one optical switch and a maximum arrival time error for data bursts arriving at the at least one optical switch; and sending the at least one burst transfer permit by the selected core switching node to the edge node.