Flow-oriented dynamic assembly algorithm in TCP over OBS networks

OBS is envisioned as a promising infrastructure for the next generation optical network, and TCP is likely to be the dominant transport protocol in the next generation network. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the performance of TCP over OBS networks. The assembly at the ingress edge nodes will impact the network performance. There have been several Fixed Assembly Period (FAP) algorithms proposed. However, the assembly period in FAP is fixed, and it can not be adjusted according to the network condition. Moreover, in FAP, the packets from different TCP sources are assembled into one burst. In that case, if such a burst is dropped, the TCP windows of the corresponding sources will shrink and the throughput will be reduced. In this paper, we introduced a flow-oriented Dynamic Assembly Period (DAP) algorithm for TCP over OBS networks. Through comparing the previous and current burst lengths, DAP can track the variation of TCP window, and update the assembly period dynamically for the next assembly. The performance of DAP is evaluated over a single TCP connection and multiple connections, respectively. The simulation results show that DAP performs better than FAP at almost the whole range of burst dropping probability.