Effect of burst assembly over TCP performance in optical burst switching networks

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is proposed as a short-term feasible solution that is capable of efficiently utilizing the optical bandwidth of the future Internet backbone. Performance evaluation of TCP traffic in OBS networks has been under intensive study, as TCP constitutes the majority of Internet traffic. Since burst assembly mechanism is one of the fundamental factors that determine the performance of an OBS network, we focus our attention on burst assembly and specifically, we investigate the influence of the number of burstifiers on TCP performance for an OBS network. We start with a simple OBS network scenario where very large flows are considered and losses resulting from the congestion in the core OBS network are modeled using a burst independent Bernoulli loss model. Then, a background burst traffic is generated in order to create contention at a core node realizing burst-length dependent losses. Finally, simulations are repeated for Internet flows where flow sizes are modeled using a Bounded Pareto distribution. Simulation results show that for an OBS network employing timerbased assembly algorithm, TCP goodput increases as the number of burst assemblers is increased for each loss model. The improvement from one burstifier to moderate number of burst assemblers is significant, but the goodput difference between moderate number of buffers and per-flow aggregation is relatively small, implying that a cost-effective OBS edge switch implementation should use moderate number of assembly buffers per destination. The numerical studies are carried out using nOBS, which is an ns2 based OBS simulation tool, built within this thesis for studying the effects of burst assembly, scheduling and contention resolution algorithms in OBS networks.