Impact of Queueing Delay Estimation Error on Equilibrium and Its Stability

Delay-based transmission control protocols need to separate round-trip time (RTT) measurements into their constituting parts: the propagation and the queueing delays. We consider two means for this; the first is to take the propagation delay as the minimum observed RTT value, and the second is to measure the queueing delay at the routers and feed it back to the sources. We choose FAST-TCP as a representative delay-based transmission control protocol for analysis and study the impact of delay knowledge errors on its performance. We have shown that while the first method destroys fairness and the uniqueness of the equilibrium, the stability of the protocol can easily be obtained through tuning the protocol terms appropriately. Even though the second technique is shown to preserve fairness and uniqueness of the equilibrium point, we have presented that unavoidable oscillations can occur around the equilibrium point.