Testing the impairments of dynamic optical switching on TCP traffic through the European FEDERICA testbed infrastructure

In this article we examine the impairments that dynamic optical circuit switching can cause on the TCP transport protocol. Although the TCP Reno implementation solves some of the issues that occurred in legacy TCP during path switch, we found out that if optical path switching is used to bypass congested routers, impairments on TCP flows can still occur. We show the results of experiments carried out both in our laboratory and on the newly deployed European FEDERICA testbed infrastructure.