TCP Vegas revisited

The innovative techniques of TCP Vegas have been the subject of much debate in recent years. Several studies have reported that TCP Vegas provides better performance than TCP Reno. However, the question of which of the new techniques are responsible for the impressive performance gains remains unanswered so far. This paper presents a detailed performance evaluation of TCP Vegas. By decomposing TCP Vegas into the various novel mechanisms proposed and assessing the effect of each of these mechanisms on performance, we show that the reported performance gains are achieved primarily by TCP Vegas's new techniques for slow start and congestion recovery. TCP Vegas's innovative congestion avoidance mechanism is shown to have only a minor influence on throughput. Furthermore, we find that the congestion avoidance mechanism exhibits fairness problems even if all competing connections operate with the same round trip time.

[1]  Peter B. Danzig,et al.  tcplib: A Library of TCP Internetwork Traffic Characteristics , 2002 .

[2]  Jean C. Walrand,et al.  Analysis and comparison of TCP Reno and Vegas , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

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

[4]  Larry L. Peterson,et al.  TCP Vegas: End to End Congestion Avoidance on a Global Internet , 1995, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[5]  Janey C. Hoe.  Improving the start-up behavior of a congestion control scheme for TCP , 1996, SIGCOMM '96.

[6]  Sally Floyd,et al.  TCP and Successive Fast Retransmits , 1995 .

[7]  Zhen Liu,et al.  Evaluation of TCP Vegas: emulation and experiment , 1995, SIGCOMM '95.

[8]  Larry L. Peterson,et al.  The x-Kernel: An Architecture for Implementing Network Protocols , 1991, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[9]  Van Jacobson,et al.  Congestion avoidance and control , 1988, SIGCOMM '88.

[10]  Peter B. Danzig,et al.  Packet network simulation: speedup and accuracy versus timing granularity , 1996, TNET.

[11]  Yongguang Zhang,et al.  A Measurement of TCP over Long-Delay Network , 1998 .

[12]  Masayuki Murata,et al.  Fairness and stability of congestion control mechanisms of TCP , 2000, Telecommun. Syst..

[13]  Larry L. Peterson,et al.  Performance problems in BSD4. 4TCP , 1995, CCRV.

[14]  Masayuki Murata,et al.  Fairness and stability of congestion control mechanisms of TCP , 1998, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[15]  Vern Paxson,et al.  On estimating end-to-end network path properties , 2001, SIGCOMM LA '01.

[16]  Ray Jain,et al.  The art of computer systems performance analysis - techniques for experimental design, measurement, simulation, and modeling , 1991, Wiley professional computing.

[17]  Vern Paxson,et al.  On estimating end-to-end network path properties , 2001, SIGCOMM LA '01.

[18]  Larry L. Peterson,et al.  TCP Vegas: new techniques for congestion detection and avoidance , 1994 .

[19]  Sally Floyd,et al.  RFC 2018: TCP Selective Acknowledgment Options , 1996 .

[20]  Thomas R. Gross,et al.  The effectiveness of end-to-end congestion control mechanisms , 1999 .