Improvement of TCP Performance over Optical Burst Switching Networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) performance over optical burst switching (OBS) is experimentally investigated on an OBS network testbed. The effect of burst losses on TCP performance over the OBS testbed is studied and the result shows that burst losses will lead to a network wide drop in TCP throughput and there exists an optimal assembly period to maximize the available TCP bandwidth. Then a new assembly mechanism constraining the ratio of acknowledgement (ACK) number to all the segment number in one burst is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that compared with conventional assembly mechanism, the new one can improve TCP performance over OBS networks to great extent with lower network burst loss probability and higher TCP throughput.