Towards a bufferless optical internet

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between buffer size and long-term average TCP performance in dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) networks. By investigating TCP NewReno, we demonstrate that buffer requirements are related to the number of wavelength channels at a bottleneck. With sufficient wavelengths, high throughput can be obtained with a buffer of one packet per channel; furthermore, there may be situations where an entirely bufferless optical packet switching (OPS) will become feasible. For this study, we develop new evaluation tools. First, we propose a method based on a two-part analytical model, with a new "open loop" component which approximates packet discarding i..