Summary Recently, there has been an increasing research interest being directed to optical burst switching (OBS) networks because of its mature electronic processing capability and high‐capacity optical transport capability. The blocking time for an OBS node, representing the time duration in which a certain channel is occupied by some class of bursts, plays an important role in characterizing the performance of an OBS network. In this paper, we analyze this important metric for an OBS node with a horizonal and a single channel theoretically a...