SPECTRAL THREAT IN TCP OVER OPTICAL BURST SWITCHED NETWORKS

Abstract

Exponential increase in the number of online users has increased over the years posed a demand for high speed core architecture for the internet. The Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a new switching architecture that efficiently utilizes the bandwidth of the optical layer. It offers all-optical switching as there is no Optical-Electronic conversion at any intermediate switching node. It is one of the three optical switching architectures, while others being Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) and Optical Packet Switching (OPS). The basic switching entity of OBS is a burst which posses an intermediate granularity between a packet and the amount of optical data in a circuit. The OBS architecture merits the shortcomings of the other two optical architectures namely OCS and OPS. This efficient core networking architecture, suffers from various security vulnerabilities. This paper proposes a novel security threat namely the spectral threat. It is a threat that affects only multicast capable nodes. Multicast Capable nodes are those nodes that are capable of multicasting an optical data. The wavelength of the optical data burst is altered resulting in flooding of data to a particular outgoing channel and ultimately blocking the channel. The attack results in losses thereby reducing the burst throughput and increasing the burst latency. The paper further summarizes other potential threats affecting normal nodes and Multicast Capable nodes for TCP over OBS networks.