Performance evaluation of MPTCP over optical burst switching in data centers

Abstract

Data centers have become the heart of the computational world over the past few years. The emergence of cloud computing and the growth of data-intensive applications have driven the need for finding alternative ways to improve communication efficiency in data center networks. In this paper, we combine the advantages of Multipath-TCP with optical networking to maximize bandwidth in datacenters and present an evaluation of MPTCP over optical burst switching (OBS) for data center network. We compare the performance of standard TCP with MPTCP under different network loads and topologies using realistic data center traffic models. Our simulation tests have established that Multipath-TCP over OBS provides significant performance advantage in terms of improving throughput, reliability and fairness for data center networks.