Simulating Large-Scale Traffic Aggregation in an Automatic Switched Optical Network

Automatic Switched Optical Network (ASON), standardized by ITU-T, is emerging as a major technology choice for inter-operational and intervendor optical backbone transportation. With the ability to flexibly and automatically establish and maintain connection, ASON promises an IP-traffic tolerant, end-to-end QoS guaranteed transportation mechanism within which both bandwidth-consuming stream media traffic and traditional web traffic can be relayed smoothly. In this paper, we look into the traffic aggregation effect of TCP traffic in an optical switched network environment modeled under the 3TNet network architecture. We provide a simplified simulation model, which shows how large-scale TCP traffic aggregation can be leveraged by ASON switching ability and meanwhile proves the superiority of this architecture.