TCP performance in an optical link applying lightpath bundling and anycast switching techniques

Lightpath bundling (LB) technique consists of grouping a set of lightpaths between two nodes so that they appear to the IP layer as a single pipe of aggregated capacity. Anycast switching (AS) technique makes a per-packet granularity balancing of the traffic among the lightpaths bundled. LB+AS combination requires seamless changes in the switching nodes and no changes in the optical infrastructure. This paper evaluates by means of simulation the improvements in TCP performances when LB+AS paradigm is applied to the network. In our results, LB+AS improved TCP throughput (up to 18%), decreased average drop rates and reduced the average queuing delay in the bottleneck link (up to 15%).