Impact of Optical Packet Loss and Reordering on TCP Performance

Next generation optical network technologies such as OPS and OBS have a non-negligible impact on the performance of the transport layer. This is related to how a packet stream traversing the optical network is affected by random behaviors such as latency variability, out-of-sequence delivery and loss. This paper tries to better understand how the use of contention resolution schemes at the optical layer affects the TCP performance, focusing in particular on the impact of unordered delivery and loss of packets.