We propose and evaluate a new burst assembly algorithm based on the average delay of the packets comprising a burst. This method fixes the average delay of the packets belonging to an assembled burst to a desired value TAVE that may be different for each forwarding equivalence class (FEC). We show that the proposed method significantly improves the delay jitter experienced by the packets during the burst assembly process, when compared to that of timer-based and burst length-based assembly policies. Minimizing packet delay jitter is important in a number of applications, such as real-audio and streaming-video applications. We also find that the improvement in the packet delay jitter yields a corresponding significant improvement in the performance of TCP, whose operation depends critically on the ability to obtain accurate estimates of the round-trip times (RTT). c 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.