On the fairness characteristics of FAST TCP

Fairness of competing transmission control protocol (TCP) flows is an integral and indispensable part of transport protocol design for next-generation, high-bandwidth-delay product networks. It is not just a protocol-intrinsic property but it could also have severe impact on quality of experience (QoE). In this paper, we revisit FAST TCP fairness behavior based on a comprehensive performance evaluation study. We demonstrate that FAST TCP with proper parameter settings can always achieve fair behavior with HighSpeed TCP and Scalable TCP. We also show that this behavior is a rather robust property of the protocol concerning different traffic mix or network topology. The dynamic behavior of reaching the fair equilibrium state can be different, which is demonstrated in the paper. Our study also emphasizes the important need for finding a dynamic sensitive fairness metric for performance evaluation of transport protocols for next-generation, high-bandwidth-delay product networks.

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