Design and Analysis of a Modified TCP for Optical Burst Switched Networks

Performance of existing TCP implementation are not satisfactory in Optical Burst Switched (OBS) networks. TCP throughput suffers in OBS networks due to undesired timer expiry as a result of burst loss in bufferless OBS networks. TCP misinterprets any loss as a signal for congestion and burst assembler introduces different delays to different TCP segments. In this paper we propose a loss differentiation scheme that includes the assembly time in the decision making process. We present a protocol level technique for estimating assembly time at the TCP end points and use this information to differentiate congestion induced loss or contention induced loss.