Quantitative Performance Evaluation of Microburst Packet Transmission Control for Transport Layer Protocols in Optical Packet Switching Networks

In an Optical Packet Switching (OPS) network environment, the absence of practical optical buffers results in frequent packet collisions at intermediate nodes, as multiple packets may arrive simultaneously at the same output port of a certain intermediate node. This leads to substantial packet loss even under non-congested conditions. Consequently, the conventional Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) does not fully utilize the bandwidth of the bottleneck links. Moreover, highly bursty data transmission can impose the above impact excessively on intermediate nodes in OPS networks, making it undesirable. To address this issue, we have presented a control mechanism consisting of two disciplines: microburst transmission and congestion window updating. However, the performance of microburst transmission control itself, which corresponds to TCP pacing, has not been quantitatively clarified. In this paper, we quantitatively evaluate the performance of microburst transmission control. Specifically, we investigate the impact of different microburst transmission intervals on throughput and clarify the potential fairness of throughput among optical paths with different route lengths.