nOBS: an ns2 based simulation tool for performance evaluation of TCP traffic in OBS networks

Performance evaluation of TCP traffic in OBS networks has been under intensive study, since TCP constitutes the majority of Internet traffic. As a reliable and publicly available simulator, ns2 has been widely used for studying TCP/IP networks; however ns2 lacks many of the components for simulating optical burst switching networks. In this paper, an ns2 based OBS simulation tool (nOBS), which is built for studying burst assembly, scheduling and contention resolution algorithms in OBS networks is presented. The node and link objects in OBS are extended in nOBS for developing optical nodes and optical links. The ingress, core and egress node functionalities are combined into a common optical node architecture, which comprises agents responsible for burstification, routing and scheduling. The effects of burstfication parameters, e.g., burstification timeout, burst size and number,of burstification buffers per egress node, on TCP performance are investigated using nOBS for different TCP versions and different network topologies.