Abstract— Optical Burst and Packet Switching are being considered as the most promising paradigms to increase bandwidth efficiency in IP over DWDM networks. In both cases, due to statistical multiplexing, a scheduling policy is needed to solve contentions at the node level caused by more than one burst/packet directed to the same output channel. The scheduling may be performed in the wavelength, time and space domains, turning this problem into a choice of the best available resource in the different domains. Because of the very large bandwidth on the wavelength channels, the burst/packet arrival rate at the network nodes is very high and therefore the time available to take the scheduling decision is very limited. As a consequence, whatever scheduling policy is adopted, it must be implemented in an extremely effective way in terms of computational complexity. This paper is focused on a cost-effective solution to the scheduling problem, which is not based on typical search algorithm...