Performance evaluation of TCP over software-defined optical burst-switched data centre network

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the performance of TCP when used in data centre networks (DCNs) featuring optical burst switching (OBS) using two-way reservation. The two-way reservation is not suitable in wide-area OBS networks due to high bandwidth-delay product (BDP). The burst loss using traditional methods of one-way reservation can be mistakenly interpreted by the TCP layer as congestion instead of contention in OBS network, leading to serious degradation of the TCP performance. The reduced BDP in DCNs allows the use of two-way reservation that results in zero burst loss. The modelled architecture features fast optical switches in a single hop topology. We apply different workloads with various burst assembly parameters to evaluate the performance of TCP. Our results show significant improvement in TCP performance as compared to traditional methods of OBS as well as to a conventional electronic packet switching DCN.