Assembling TCP/IP packets in optical burst switched networks

Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising paradigm for the next-generation Internet infrastructure. We study the performance of TCP traffic in OBS networks and in particular, the effect of assembly algorithms on TCP traffic. We describe three assembly algorithms in this paper and compare them using the same TCP traffic input. The results show that the performance of the proposed adaptive-assembly-period (AAP) algorithm is better than that of the min-burstlength-max-assembly-period (MBMAP) algorithm and the fixed-assembly-period (FAP) algorithm in terms of goodput and data loss rate. The results also indicate that burst assembly mechanisms affect the behavior of TCP in that the assembled TCP traffic becomes smoother in the short term, and more suitable for transmission in optical networks.