Improving Reno and New-Reno's performances over OBS networks without SACK

In TCP over optical burst switching (OBS) networks, consecutive multiple packet losses are common since an optical burst usually contains a number of consecutive packets from the same TCP sender. It has been proved that over OBS networks Reno and New-Reno achieve lower throughput performances than that of SACK, which can address the inefficiency of Reno and New-Reno in dealing with consecutive multiple packet losses. However, SACK adopts complex mechanisms not only at the sender's but also at the receiver's protocol stack, and thus has a higher difficulty in deployment.In this paper we propose B-Reno, a new TCP implementation designed for TCP over OBS networks. Using some simple modifications to New-Reno only at the sender's protocol stack, B-Reno can overcome the inefficiencies of Reno and New-Reno in dealing with consecutive multiple packet losses and thus improve their throughputs over OBS networks. Moreover, B-Reno can also achieve performance similar with that of SACK over OBS networks while avoiding SACK's difficulty in deployment due to complex mechanisms at both the sender's and the receiver's protocol stack.