Effect of burst assembly over TCP performance in optical burst switching networks

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is proposed as a short-term feasible solution that is capable of efficiently utilizing the optical bandwidth of the future Internet backbone. Performance evaluation of TCP traffic in OBS networks has been under intensive study, as TCP constitutes the majority of Internet traffic. Since burst assembly mechanism is one of the fundamental factors that determine the performance of an OBS network, we focus our attention on burst assembly and specifically, we investigate the influence of the number of burstifiers on TCP performance for an OBS network. We start with a simple OBS network scenario where very large flows are considered and losses resulting from the congestion in the core OBS network are modeled using a burst independent Bernoulli loss model. Then, a background burst traffic is generated in order to create contention at a core node realizing burst-length dependent losses. Finally, simulations are repeated for Internet flows where flow sizes are modeled using a Bounded Pareto distribution. Simulation results show that for an OBS network employing timerbased assembly algorithm, TCP goodput increases as the number of burst assemblers is increased for each loss model. The improvement from one burstifier to moderate number of burst assemblers is significant, but the goodput difference between moderate number of buffers and per-flow aggregation is relatively small, implying that a cost-effective OBS edge switch implementation should use moderate number of assembly buffers per destination. The numerical studies are carried out using nOBS, which is an ns2 based OBS simulation tool, built within this thesis for studying the effects of burst assembly, scheduling and contention resolution algorithms in OBS networks.Gürel, GürayM.S

Using multiple per egress burstifiers for enhanced TCP performance in OBS networks

Burst assembly mechanism is one of the fundamental factors that determine the performance of an optical burst switching (OBS) network. In this paper, we investigate the influence of the number of burstifiers on TCP performance for an OBS network. The goodput of TCP flows between an ingress node and an egress node traveling through an optical network is studied as the number of assembly buffers per destination varies. First, the burst-length independent losses resulting from the contention in the core OBS network using a non-void-filling burst scheduling algorithm, e.g., Horizon, are studied. Then, burst-length dependent losses arising as a result of void-filling scheduling algorithms, e.g., LAUC-VF, are studied for two different TCP flow models: FTP-type long-lived flows and variable size short-lived flows. Simulation results show that for both types of scheduling algorithms, both types of TCP flow models, and different TCP versions (Reno, Newreno and Sack), TCP goodput increases as the number of burst assemblers per egress node is increased for an OBS network employing timer-based assembly algorithm. The improvement from one burstifier to moderate number of burst assemblers is significant (15-50% depending on the burst loss probability, per-hop processing delay, and the TCP version), but the goodput difference between moderate number of buffers and per-flow aggregation is relatively small, implying that an OBS edge switch should use moderate number of assembly buffers per destination for enhanced TCP performance without substantially increasing the hardware complexity. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Congestion window based adaptive burst assembly for TCP traffic in optical burst switching networks

Ankara : The Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Sciences of Bilkent Univ., 2008.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2008.Includes bibliographical references leaves 51-55.Burst assembly is one of the key factors affecting the TCP performance in Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks. Timer based burst assembly algorithm generates bursts independent of the rate of TCP flows. When TCP congestion window is small, the fixed-delay burst assembler waits unnecessarily long, which increases the end-to-end delay and decreases the TCP goodput. On the other hand, when TCP congestion window becomes larger, the fixed-delay burst assembler may unnecessarily generate a large number of small-sized bursts, which increases the overhead and decreases the correlation gain, resulting in a reduction in the TCP goodput. Using simulations, we show that the usage of the congestion window (cwnd) size of TCP flows in the burst assembly algorithm consistently improves the TCP goodput (by up to 38.4%) compared with the fixed-delay timer based assembly even when the timer based assembler uses the optimum assembly period threshold value. One limitation of this proposed method is the assumption that the exact value of the congestion window is available at the burst assembler. We then extend the adaptive burstification algorithm such that the burst assembler uses estimated values of the congestion winpassive measurements at the ingress node. It is shown through simulations that even when estimated values are used, TCP goodput can achieve values close to the results obtained by using exact values of the congestion window. dow that are obtained viaÖzsaraç, SeçkinM.S

Transport Control Protocol (TCP) over Optical Burst Switched Networks

Transport Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant protocol in modern communication networks, in which the issues of reliability, flow, and congestion control must be handled efficiently. This thesis studies the impact of the next-generation bufferless optical burst-switched (OBS) networks on the performance of TCP congestion-control implementations (i.e., dropping-based, explicit-notification-based, and delay-based). The burst contention phenomenon caused by the buffer-less nature of OBS occurs randomly and has a negative impact on dropping-based TCP since it causes a false indication of network congestion that leads to improper reaction on a burst drop event. In this thesis we study the impact of these random burst losses on dropping-based TCP throughput. We introduce a novel congestion control scheme for TCP over OBS networks, called Statistical Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (SAIMD). SAIMD maintains and analyzes a number of previous round trip times (RTTs) at the TCP senders in order to identify the confidence with which a packet-loss event is due to network congestion. The confidence is derived by positioning short-term RTT in the spectrum of long-term historical RTTs. The derived confidence corresponding to the packet loss is then taken in to account by the policy developed for TCP congestion-window adjustment. For explicit-notification TCP, we propose a new TCP implementation over OBS networks, called TCP with Explicit Burst Loss Contention Notification (TCP-BCL). We examine the throughput performance of a number of representative TCP implementations over OBS networks, and analyze the TCP performance degradation due to the misinterpretation of timeout and packet-loss events. We also demonstrate that the proposed TCP-BCL scheme can counter the negative effect of OBS burst losses and is superior to conventional TCP architectures in OBS networks. For delay-based TCP, we observe that this type of TCP implementation cannot detect network congestion when deployed over typical OBS networks since RTT fluctuations are minor. Also, delay-based TCP can suffer from falsely detecting network congestion when the underlying OBS network provides burst retransmission and/or deflection. Due to the fact that burst retransmission and deflection schemes introduce additional delays for bursts that are retransmitted or deflected, TCP cannot determine whether this sudden delay is due to network congestion or simply to burst recovery at the OBS layer. In this thesis we study the behaviour of delay-based TCP Vegas over OBS networks, and propose a version of threshold-based TCP Vegas that is suitable for the characteristics of OBS networks. The threshold-based TCP Vegas is able to distinguish increases in packet delay due to network congestion from burst contention at low traffic loads. The evolution of OBS technology is highly coupled with its ability to support upper-layer applications. Without fully understanding the burst transmission behaviour and the associated impact on the TCP congestion-control mechanism, it will be difficult to exploit the advantages of OBS networks fully

Effect of number of burst assemblers on TCP performance in optical burst switching networks

Burst assembly mechanism is one of the fundamental factors that determine the performance of an optical burst switching (OBS) network. In this paper, we investigate the influence of number of burstifiers on TCP performance for an OBS network. An ns2-based OBS network simulator is developed for simulating the optical network. The goodput of TCP flows between an ingress and an egress nodes traveling through an optical network is studied for different values of the number of assembly buffers per destination. First, the losses resulting from the congestion in the core OBS network are modeled using a burst independent Bernoulli loss model. Then, a background burst traffic is generated to create contention at a core node in order to realize a burst dependent loss model. Simulation results show that for an OBS network employing timer-based assembly algorithm, TCP goodput increases as the number of burst assemblers is increased for both types of loss models. The improvement from one burstifier to moderate number of burst assemblers is significant (15-50% depending on the burst loss probability, processing delay and the TCP version), but the goodput difference between moderate number of buffers andperflow aggregation is relatively small, implying that a cost-effective OBS edge switch implementation should use moderate number of assembly buffers per destination for enhanced TCP performance. © 2006 IEEE

A Unified End-to-End Communication Paradigm for Heterogeneous Networks

The aim of this thesis research is to develop a unified communication paradigm that provides an end-to-end bursting model across heterogeneous realms. This model generates end-to-end bursts, thereby eliminating edge node burst assembly and its effect on TCP performance. Simulation models are developed in ns-2 to validate this work by comparing it with edge burst assembly on OBS networks. Analysis shows improved end-to-end performance for a variety of burst sizes, timeouts, and other network parameters

Reducing Internet Latency : A Survey of Techniques and their Merit

Bob Briscoe, Anna Brunstrom, Andreas Petlund, David Hayes, David Ros, Ing-Jyh Tsang, Stein Gjessing, Gorry Fairhurst, Carsten Griwodz, Michael WelzlPeer reviewedPreprin

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

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

Congestion window-based adaptive burst assembly for TCP traffic in OBS networks

Burst assembly is one of the key factors affecting the TCP performance in optical burst switching (OBS) networks. When the TCP congestion window is small, the fixed-delay burst assembler waits unnecessarily long, which increases the end-to-end delay and thus decreases the TCP goodput. On the other hand, when the TCP congestion window becomes larger, the fixed-delay burst assembler may unnecessarily generate a large number of small-sized bursts, which increases the overhead and decreases the correlation gain, resulting in a reduction in the TCP goodput. In this paper, we propose adaptive burst assembly algorithms that use the congestion window sizes of TCP flows. Using simulations, we show that the usage of the congestion window size in the burst assembly algorithm significantly improves the TCP goodput (by up to 38.4% on the average and by up to 173.89% for individual flows) compared with the timerbased assembly, even when the timer-based assembler uses the optimum assembly period. It is shown through simulations that even when estimated values of the congestion window size, that are obtained via passive measurements, are used, TCP goodput improvements are still close to the results obtained by using exact values of the congestion window. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

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 burstification 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