Self-Management of Optical Switching

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a protocol that is widely deployed in most IP networks. It is the main protocol on the transport layer on the Internet. Also, it is a stateful protocol. Optical switching, on the other hand, is a technique that will be employed more and more in the future. This technique provides the moving of ongoing TCP flows from the IP level to established lightpaths on the optical level. Currently a switch is performed manually. However, in the future, autonomic optical switching will be used more often to move ongoing TCP flows on demand. In this report an analysis is provided of what could happen when moving TCP flows on-the-fly. The impact on several TCP congestion control algorithms are examined, namely TCP Reno, Vegas, Compound and Cubic.