A Step toward Realistic Performance Evaluation of High-Speed TCP Variants

This is a work-in-progress report on our work on designing realistic evaluation suites for testing high-speed TCP variants. In this work, we have created an experimental network model that captures some of the complex characteristics of propagation delays and background traffic [14, 15, 20]. We use our network model to evaluate a large collection of recently proposed TCPs for high-speed networks: BIC TCP, CUBIC, FAST, HSTCP, H-TCP, and STCP. While we do not claim that we have the most realistic experimental network model, we believe that our work is a right step towards improving experimental methodologies for evaluating network protocols. In this report, we show how protocols could behave differently under the presence or absence of background traffic, and point out the danger of drawing conclusions based on testing under an isolated case of no background traffic.

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