Optical switching impact on TCP throughput limited by TCP buffers

Abstract

In this paper, we observe the performance of TCP throughput when self-management is employed to automatically move flows from the IP level to established connections at the optical level. This move can result in many packets arriving out of order at the receiver and even being discarded, since some of these packets would be transferred more quickly over an optical connection than the other packets transferred over an IP path. To the best of our knowledge, so far there is no work in the literature that evaluates the TCP throughput when flows undergo such conditions. Within this context, this paper presents an analysis of the impact of optical switching on the TCP CUBIC throughput when the throughput itself is limited by the TCP buffer sizes. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.