A Novel Congestion Detection Scheme in TCP Over OBS Networks

This paper introduces a novel congestion detection scheme for high-bandwidth TCP flows over optical burst switching (OBS) networks, called statistical additive increase multiplicative decrease (SAIMD). SAIMD maintains and analyzes a number of previous round-trip time (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 the developed policy for TCP congestion window adjustment. We will show through extensive simulation that the proposed scheme can effectively solve the false congestion detection problem and significantly outperform the conventional TCP counterparts without losing fairness. The advantages gained in our scheme are at the expense of introducing more overhead in the SAIMD TCP senders. Based on the proposed congestion control algorithm, a throughput model is formulated, and is further verified by simulation results.