Smooth TCP

The TCP’s congestion control mechanism presents two problems. The first is the delay that occurs between the time a congestion event is detected and the time the sender takes to recognize it and react to prevent further congestion. The second is related to the use of packet drops as the main congestion indicator. This is inherently imprecise since a packet loss is also detected as a packet drop due to a full queue. In order to deal with these two problems and add some other desirable characteristics to TCP, we define a new property that a congestion control mechanism should have and propose a new mechanism satisfying this requirement defined generically as the Smoothness Property.