An optical network, which includes edge and switching nodes, optically communicate information formatted into statistically multiplexed control and data bursts and/or metadata. Control bursts are transmitted prior to the data bursts to configure optical switches in selected switching nodes so that the data bursts do not require O-E-O conversion. Each edge node consists of an adaptive PBS medium-access layer (MAC) component in order to achieve the transmission throughput improvement. The adaptive PBS MAC component enables the PBS data burst size to adapt to the TCP flow, allowing the PBS data burst to be transmitted immediately for the TCP flow experiencing TCP slow start. It performs a "deep" packet inspection of control packets coming back to the data source from the destination PBS network edge node to detect packet losses.