Impact of deflection routing on TCP performance in optical burst switching networks

This work analyzes the behaviour of TCP connections in optical burst switching networks with deflection routing. A simplified model of an OBS network was implemented and a number of TCP based file transfer connections in the OBS network were simulated. Different TCP versions (Tahoe, Reno) in conjunction with different deflection ratios and burst loss probabilities were investigated and compared. The results show that deflection routing leads to a degradation of TCP performance, which is however much lower as in the case where the deflected bursts are dropped instead. The simulations were performed using the simulation program OPNET modeler.