  A comparison of three different Optical Burst Switching (OBS) architectures
is made, in terms of performance criteria, control and hardware complexity,
fairness, resource utilization, and burst loss probability. Regarding burst
losses, we distinguish the losses due to burst contentions from those due to
contentions of Burst Control Packets (BCP). The simulation results show that as
a counterpart of an its additional hardware complexity, the labelled OBS
(L-OBS) is an efficient OBS architecture compared to a Conventional OBS (C-OBS)
as well as in comparison with Offset Time-Emulated OBS (E-OBS).
