ARL-TR-8032 ● JUNE 2017

US Army Research Laboratory

Optical 3-Way Handshake (O3WHS) Protocol 

Simulation in OMNeT++

by Vinod K Mishra and Luke Taylor

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ARL-TR-8032 ● JUNE 2017

US Army Research Laboratory

Optical 3-Way Handshake (O3WHS) Protocol 

Simulation in OMNeT++

by Vinod K Mishra 

Computational and Informational Sciences Directorate, ARL

Luke Taylor

University of Texas, San Antonio, TX

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June 2017

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June 2016–August 2016

4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE

Optical 3-Way Handshake (O3WHS) Protocol Simulation in OMNeT++

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6. AUTHOR(S)

Vinod K Mishra and Luke Taylor

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US Army Research Laboratory

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Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 21005-5067

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ARL-TR-8032

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13. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES

14. ABSTRACT

The Optical 3-Way Handshake (O3WHS) protocol was developed under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 

CORONET project. It meets the stringent resource allocation requirement of a dynamic terabit optical network. A simulation 

of O3WHS operations in a simple network using OMNeT++ network simulation tool has been presented here and the results 

have been analyzed. This simulation has potential for application to larger heterogeneous networks with software-defined 

optical networking architecture.

15. SUBJECT TERMS

dynamic optical networking, CORONET, O3WHS, SDON, OMNeT++

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Vinod K Mishra

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Contents

List of Figures iv

1. Introduction 1

2. O3WHS Protocol 2

3. The Network Model 3

4. Results and Discussion 4

6. Conclusions 5

7. References 6

List of Symbols, Abbreviations, and Acronyms 7

Distribution List 8
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List of Figures

Fig. 1 O3WHS protocol steps ......................................................................... 2

Fig. 2 A simple network topology and snapshot of the runtime with code..... 3

Fig. 3 CONUS network with mesh topology .................................................. 4
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1. Introduction

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) concluded a project 

called CORONET in 2015 that took a closer look at the requirements for the 

next-generation terabit speed optical networks. It aimed at finding new 

architectures and protocols to fulfill the following requirements1:

• A connection setup blocking probability requirement of less than 10–3

• A connection setup time of less than 50 ms round-trip fiber transmission 

delay

The blocking probability is defined as the probability that a packet will be blocked 

because all channels are being used by other packets.

Among many innovations, the CORONET project came up with a new and 

innovative protocol called 3-way handshake for optical resource or optical 3-way 

handshake (O3WHS) and configuration management. We will use O3WHS to 

distinguish it from similar protocol at the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/IP 

layer of the Internet.

The original DARPA CORONET program emulated the O3WHS protocol on a 

network topology covering a fictitious global network1 modeled on existing 

commercial nodes. It consisted of 100 nodes (80 small and 20 large) of which 75 

were inside the continental United States (CONUS). The total number of links was 

136. The network nodes had maximum nodal degree of 5 and average nodal degree 

of 2.7. An Optimized Network Engineering Tools platform was used to model this 

complex topology.

A need exists for implementing and modeling O3WHS on heterogeneous and 

multidomain networks to experiment with different use cases. In the current work 

we simulate O3WHS in a popular program called OMNeT++2 for that purpose. It 

is an open-source discrete event simulator tool written in C++ language. It has been 

chiefly applied to the modeling of communication networks but can be adapted to 

other distributed and parallel systems. In particular, we use its INET framework for 

O3WHS simulation. It provides models for TCP, IPv4, IPv6, Ethernet, 

IEEE802.11b/g, Multi-Protocol Label Switching, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF

v4), and several other protocols. It also includes the Quagga routing daemon. Our 

aim in the current work is to initially simulate a simpler network topology that will 

provide a proof of concept for its applicability to O3WHS protocol. 
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2. O3WHS Protocol

The O3WHS protocol consists of 3 stages in which the path information is collected 

and finalized. Figure 1 presents a step-by-step description of the O3WHS protocol.

Fig. 1 O3WHS protocol steps

The steps in the 3 stages are given as follows:

1) First Pass

The source node sends probes to the destination node on all possible paths. 

As the probe goes through different nodes, it collects the routing 

information. 

2) Second Pass 

a. The destination node receives the node and link information for all 

probed paths and calculates the best path optimized according to some 

performance metric (e.g., minimization of delay, minimization of 

needed wavelength conversion). 
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b. It then sends an acknowledgment signal back to the source node on that 

best path and allocates the node resources (e.g., bandwidth on that path 

at the same time). This step makes sure that path resources are not used 

by another request.

3) Third Pass

The source node sends the data payload to the destination node on the 

chosen best path.

3. The Network Model

We consider a network topology of 8 nodes forming a ring and the ninth central 

node connecting to 2 ring nodes (Fig. 2). 

Fig. 2 A simple network topology and snapshot of the runtime with code

After working with this preliminary network to gain experience, another network 

with mesh topology was used that encompassed CONUS (Fig. 3). 
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Fig. 3 CONUS network with mesh topology

Because the program cannot handle too many probes used in the first pass, 

constraints were put on some network parameters, such as expiration time and 

maximum hop count, to limit their number. The following values were used for the 

O3WHS protocol element attributes for this purpose:

• expirationTime = 0.08 s. This is the time period after which the packet 

ceases to exist.

• dataStreamSize = 5 packets. This is the number of packets in the data 

payload.

• pass2WaitTime = 0.05 s. This is the time period applicable to pass 2. The 

source node waits for this period before the next step.

• pass2DatarateFactor = 2. This is the scale of how much better bandwidth 

must be required for one path to be favored over another.

4. Results and Discussion

The experiment proved the O3WHS protocol does not apply perfectly to traditional 

networks. The exponential growth of probes makes an all-routes check inefficient 

at moderate scales. In addition, limiting the probes to only a few paths is not as 
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simple with traditional networks as with optical networks, where wavelength 

division multiplexing allows the probes to follow the same physical route while 

traveling different wavelengths.

A question arises whether the new approach to configuration management and 

resource allocation in O3WHS can be used for nonoptical networking to improve 

performance. The O3WHS is written and designed for Optical Transport Network 

hierarchy as a natural and efficient replacement for TCP. It uses multipath probing 

to ensure that a path is always available for transport. Traditional TCP networks do 

not benefit from probing paths because their routes are already set using routing 

tables. They also do not benefit from optimizing wavelength conversions, a core 

feature of O3WHS. The idea of using least-loaded routing on optical networks may 

be new, but traditional networks already apply their own optimization algorithms 

to ensure their routes are as efficient as possible. A better solution for optimizing 

networks that use multiple paths without optical networking is something like 

multipath TCP (MPTCP), which increases network throughput for machines that 

are both on MPTCP connections and have multiple paths.

6. Conclusions

This investigation has proved that OMNeT++ can be used to simulate the O3WHS 

protocol in a simplified network topology. The behavior of the performance metrics 

met the expectations.

This approach can be used for existing and planned Department of Defense optical 

networks based on new paradigms like software-defined optical networking 

(SDON).3 In the future, we want to investigate the following issues related to 

O3WHS:

• How to find multiple shortest paths for routing?

• What is the optimum number of nodes and links in a given topology (e.g.,

star, mesh) for realizing the benefit of O3WHS?

• What is the best way to integrate the SDON approach with O3WHS?

• What advantage, if any, does O3WHS have over Generalized Multiprotocol 

Label Switching optical protocol?

• Is it possible to modify O3WHS to improve its performance? 
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7. References

1. Von Lehmen A, Doverspike R, Clapp G, Freimuth DM, Gannett J, Kolarov A, 

Kobrinski H, Makaya C, Mavrogiorgis E, Pastor J, Rauch M, Ramakrishnan

KK, Skoog R, Wilson B, Woodward SL. CORONET: testbeds, demonstration, 

and lessons learned [invited]. J Opt Commun Netw. 2015;7:A447.

2. Varga A, Hornig R. An overview of the OMNeT++ simulation environment. 

Simultools ′08. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Simulation 

Tools and Techniques for Communications, Networks and Systems and 

Workshops; 2008 Mar 3–7; Marseille, France.

3. Thyagaturu A, McGarry MP, Reisslein M, Kellerer W. Software defined 

optical networks (SDONs): a comprehensive survey. arXiv:1511.04376v3 

[cs.NI]. 2016 July 17.
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List of Symbols, Abbreviations, and Acronyms

CONUS continental United States

DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

IP Internet Protocol

MPTCP multipath TCP

O3WHS optical 3-way handshake

OSPF Open Shortest Path First

SDON software-defined optical networking

TCP Transmission Control Protocol
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