Experimental investigation on aggregation amplification of TCP throughput in OBS mesh network testbed

Recently, optical burst switching (OBS), which represents a balance between circuit and packet switching, has opened up some exciting new dimensions in optical networking. Burstification is an important process in OBS networks. Due to the burstification, there are two opposite effects on TCP throughput in OBS networks: delay penalty and amplification effects. In this paper these two effects are experimentally investigated simultaneously for the first time based on an OBS mesh network testbed and some valuable experimental results are achieved. Experimental results show that when BTT is less than 1.5ms, and BLT is in the BLT window, the positive effect on TCP throughput is dominant. On the other hand, if BTT is larger than 1.5ms, the BLT window will be closed, thus the delay penalty will become the dominant effect in the OBS networks.