Measuring TCP Congestion Control Behaviour in the Internet

The Internet is constantly changing and evolving. In this thesis the behaviour of various aspects of the implementation of TCP underlying the Internet are measured. These include measures of Initial Congestion Window (ICW), type of reaction to loss, Selective Acknowledgment (SACK) support, Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) support. We develop a new method to measure congestion window reduction due to three duplicate ACK inferred loss. In a previous study 94% of classified servers showed window halving, whereas we found that 50% of classified servers exhibited Binary Increase Congestion control (BIC) or Cubic style behaviour, which is a departure from a Request For Comments (RFC) requirement to reduce the congestion window by at least 50%. ECN is predicted to improve Internet performance, but previous studies have revealed a low support for it 0.5%, and ECN connections failed at a high rate due to middlebox interference 9%; in this thesis we show a steady increase over time of ECN being implemented and supported 7.2%-10.3%. ECN testing of webservers with globally routable IPv6 adderesses showed a higher success rate 21.9%. Analysis of congestion control behaviour such as Tahoe, Reno and New Reno showed New Reno dominating more strongly than before, increasing from 35% to 70% of popular webservers.

[1]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Identifying the tcp behavior of web servers , 2000, SIGCOMM 2000.

[2]  Srinivas Shakkottai,et al.  A Study of Burstiness in TCP Flows , 2005, PAM.

[3]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Increasing TCP's Initial Window , 1998, RFC.

[4]  Bill Owens,et al.  Inferring and debugging path MTU discovery failures , 2005, IMC '05.

[5]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Simulation-based comparisons of Tahoe, Reno and SACK TCP , 1996, CCRV.

[6]  Marshall T. Rose,et al.  OSI Transport Services on Top of the TCP , 1986, Comput. Networks.

[7]  Stephen Deering,et al.  Internet Protocol Version 6(IPv6) , 1998 .

[8]  N.K.G. Samaraweera.  Non-congestion packet loss detection for TCP error recovery using wireless links , 1999 .

[9]  C. Partridge,et al.  Computing the internet checksum , 1989, CCRV.

[10]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Measuring the evolution of transport protocols in the internet , 2005, CCRV.

[11]  Vern Paxson,et al.  Computing TCP's Retransmission Timer , 2000, RFC.

[12]  Aleksandar Kuzmanovic,et al.  Adding Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Capability to TCP's SYN/ACK Packets , 2005, RFC.

[13]  V. Jacobson,et al.  Congestion avoidance and control , 1988, CCRV.

[14]  Dan Pei,et al.  Quantifying the Extent of IPv6 Deployment , 2009, PAM.

[15]  Sally Floyd,et al.  The NewReno Modification to TCP's Fast Recovery Algorithm , 2004, RFC.

[16]  Injong Rhee,et al.  CUBIC: a new TCP-friendly high-speed TCP variant , 2008, OPSR.

[17]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Congestion Control Principles , 2000, RFC.

[18]  Injong Rhee,et al.  Binary increase congestion control (BIC) for fast long-distance networks , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.

[19]  Stephen E. Deering,et al.  Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification , 1995, RFC.

[20]  W. Richard Stevens,et al.  TCP Slow Start, Congestion Avoidance, Fast Retransmit, and Fast Recovery Algorithms , 1997, RFC.

[21]  Stefan Savage,et al.  Measuring packet reordering , 2002, IMW '02.

[22]  kc claffy,et al.  The RTT distribution of TCP flows on the Internet and its impact on TCP based flow control , 2004 .

[23]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Promoting the use of end-to-end congestion control in the Internet , 1999, TNET.

[24]  A. Langley.  Probing the viability of TCP extensions , 2008 .

[25]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Measuring interactions between transport protocols and middleboxes , 2004, IMC '04.

[26]  John Nagle,et al.  Congestion control in IP/TCP internetworks , 1995, CCRV.

[27]  Sally Floyd,et al.  On inferring TCP behavior , 2001, SIGCOMM 2001.

[28]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Modeling TCP throughput: a simple model and its empirical validation , 1998, SIGCOMM '98.

[29]  Gordon Fyodor Lyon,et al.  Nmap Network Scanning: The Official Nmap Project Guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning , 2009 .

[30]  Demetres Antoniades,et al.  Available bandwidth measurement as simple as running wget , 2006 .

[31]  Sally Floyd,et al.  On inferring TCP behavior , 2001, SIGCOMM.

[32]  Janardhan R. Iyengar,et al.  On the prevalence and evaluation of recent TCP enhancements , 2004, IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2004. GLOBECOM '04..

[33]  Kevin R. Fall.  Comparisons of Tahoe, Reno, and Sack TCP , 1995 .

[34]  Sally Floyd,et al.  The NewReno Modification to TCP's Fast Recovery Algorithm , 2004, RFC.

[35]  David L. Black,et al.  The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP , 2001, RFC.

[36]  Carey L. Williamson,et al.  An analysis of TCP reset behaviour on the internet , 2005, CCRV.

[37]  Sally Floyd,et al.  TCP Selective Acknowledgement Options , 1996 .

[38]  Sally Floyd,et al.  TCP Selective Acknowledgment Options , 1996, RFC.

[39]  Robert T. Braden,et al.  Requirements for Internet Hosts - Communication Layers , 1989, RFC.

[40]  Robert Beverly,et al.  A Robust Classifier for Passive TCP/IP Fingerprinting , 2004, PAM.

[41]  John P. Robinson,et al.  Mass Media Use and Social Life Among Internet Users , 2000 .

[42]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  IP Options are not an option , 2005 .

[43]  Vern Paxson,et al.  Automated packet trace analysis of TCP implementations , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[44]  Amin Vahdat,et al.  Detour: informed Internet routing and transport , 1999, IEEE Micro.

[45]  Vern Paxson,et al.  TCP Congestion Control , 1999, RFC.

[46]  David D. Clark,et al.  Window and Acknowledgement Strategy in TCP , 1982, RFC.

[47]  Matthew J. Luckie,et al.  Measuring path MTU discovery behaviour , 2010, IMC '10.