Comparative study of high-speed Linux TCP variants over high-BDP networks

Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has been profusely used by most of internet applications. Since 1970s, several TCP variants have been developed in order to cope with the fast increasing of network capacities especially in high Bandwidth Delay Product (high-BDP) networks. In these TCP variants, several approaches have been used, some of these approaches have the ability to estimate available bandwidths and some react based on network loss and/or delay changes. This variety of the used approaches arises many consequent problems with different levels of dependability and accuracy. Indeed, a particular TCP variant which is proper for wireless networks, may not fit for high-BDP wired networks and vice versa. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a comparison between the high-speed TCP variants that have a high level of importance especially after the fast growth of networks bandwidths. In this paper, high-speed TCP variants, that are implemented in Linux and available for research, have been evaluated using NS2 network simulator. This performance evaluation presents the advantages and disadvantages of these TCP variants in terms of throughput, loss-ratio and fairness over high-BDP networks. The results reveal that, CUBIC and YeAH overcome the other highspeed TCP variants in different cases of buffer size. However, they still require more improvement to extend their ability to fully utilize the high-speed bandwidths, especially when the applied buffer is near − zero or less than the BDP of the link.

Performance Investigation of Data Packets Transport Control Protocol in Heterogeneous Networks

“…Considering that the system processing time of TCP is much smaller than RTT. The BDP can be calculated by equations (Alrshah et al 2014):…”

Agile-SD: A Linux-based TCP congestion control algorithm for supporting high-speed and short-distance networks

“…In order to solve the problem of bandwidth underutilization, Cubic (Ha and Rhee, 2008), Scalable TCP (Kelly, 2003), HS-TCP (Floyd, 2003), BIC (Xu et al, 2004), HCC (Xu et al, 2011), H-TCP (D. Leith, 2004), TCP Africa (King et al, 2005), TCP Compound (Tan and Song, 2006), Fusion (Kaneko et al, 2007), TCP illinois (Liu et al, 2008) and YeAH (Baiocchi et al, 2007) have been developed and implemented in the real operating systems. All of these TCP variants are still unable to fully utilize the available bandwidths of highspeed networks, especially if the used buffer size is less than the BDP of the link (Afanasyev et al, 2010, Scharf, 2011, Callegari et al, 2012, Lar and Liao, 2013, Acharya, 2012, Mohamed A. Alrshah et al, 2014.…”

“…It significantly affects the overall performance of such networks, because it is still suffering from the problem of bandwidth under-utilization, especially if the applied buffer regime is very small. This underutilization of bandwidth is caused by the variation of the aforementioned characteristics of the networks which results either a slow growth of cwnd or an over-injection of data into the network (Afanasyev et al, 2010, Scharf, 2011, Callegari et al, 2012, Lar and Liao, 2013, Acharya, 2012, Mohamed A. Alrshah et al, 2014.…”

“…The main contribution of the proposed CCA is to implement the mechanism of agility factor. Further, intensive simulation experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance of Agile-SD compared to Compound (the default CCA of MS Windows since Windows Vista) and Cubic (the default CCA of Linux since Kernel 2.6.16) which are the default CCAs of the most commonly used operating systems (Afanasyev et al, 2010, Mohamed A. Alrshah et al, 2014.…”

DC-Vegas: A delay-based TCP congestion control algorithm for datacenter applications

“…Congestion detection mechanism is an important module of TCP algorithms [22,23]. The most widely used congestion detection mechanism is loss-based detection, which is adopted by many popular TCP algorithms such as TCP Reno [24] and CUBIC [25,26].…”