TCP performance over optical burst-switched networks with different access technologies

The interworking between different access networks and an optical burst switched network is considered here. The end-to-end performance of the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is evaluated by jointly accounting for access network protocols and the burst assembly procedure at ingress edge nodes, both with wired and wireless access solutions, based on electrical and advanced optical technologies. The influence of the assembly timeout in different access contexts is presented, and numerical investigations are performed by means of ns-2 simulations. Results show that end-to-end throughput is mostly influenced by the delay introduced by access protocols, which arise in the analyzed different scenarios, and by assembly timeout. These results provide meaningful insights about interconnected systems to the task of overall network design and, in particular, to the setup of the interworking unit parameters.