Performance Evaluation of QUIC protocol under Network Congestion

TCP is a widely used protocol for web traffic. However, TCP€™s connection setup and congestion response can impact web page load times, leading to higher page load times for users. In order to address this issue, Google came out with QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections), a UDP-based protocol that runs in the application layer. While already deployed, QUIC is not well-studied, particularly QUIC€™s congestion response as compared to TCP€™s congestion response which is critical for stability of the Internet and flow fairness. To study QUIC€™s congestion response we conduct three sets of experiments on a wired testbed. One set of our experiments focused on QUIC and TCP throughput under added delay, another set compared QUIC and TCP throughput under added packet loss, and the third set had QUIC and TCP flows share a bottleneck link to study the fairness between TCP and QUIC flows. Our results show that with random packet loss QUIC delivers higher throughput compared to TCP. However, when sharing the same link, QUIC can be unfair to TCP. With an increase in the number of competing TCP flows, a QUIC flow takes a greater share of the available link capacity compared to TCP flows

Analysis of two competing TCP/IP connections

Many mathematical models exist for describing the behavior of TCP/IP under an exogenous loss process that does not depend on the window size. The goal of this paper is to present a mathematical analysis of two asymmetric competing TCP connections where loss probabilities are directly related to their instantaneous window size, and occur when the sum of throughputs attains a given level. We obtain bounds for the stationary throughput of each connection, as well as an exact expression for symmetric connections. This allows us to further study the fairness as a function of the different round trip times. We avoid the simplifying artificial synchronization assumption that has frequently been used in the past to study similar problems, according to which whenever one connection looses a packet, the other one looses a packet as well

FAST TCP: Motivation, Architecture, Algorithms, Performance

We describe FAST TCP, a new TCP congestion control algorithm for high-speed long-latency networks, from design to implementation. We highlight the approach taken by FAST TCP to address the four difficulties which the current TCP implementation has at large windows. We describe the architecture and summarize some of the algorithms implemented in our prototype. We characterize its equilibrium and stability properties. We evaluate it experimentally in terms of throughput, fairness, stability, and responsiveness

Throughput and fairness of multiple TCP connections in wireless networks

TCP suffers from poor throughput performance in wireless networks. Furthermore, when multiple TCP connections compete at the base station, link errors and congestion lead to serious unfairness among the connections. Although the issue of TCP performance in wireless networks has attracted significant attention, most reports focus only on TCP throughput and assume that there is only a single connection in a congestion-free network. This paper studies the throughput and fairness of popular improvement mechanisms (the Snoop [8] and ELN [5]) and TCP variants with multiple TCP connections. Simulation results show that the improvement mechanisms under investigation are effective to improve TCP throughput in a wireless network. However, they cannot provide fairness among multiple TCP connections. From the studies presented, it is concluded that mechanisms to enhance TCP fairness are needed in wireless network

Transport Protocol Throughput Fairness

Interest continues to grow in alternative transport protocols to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). These alternatives include protocols designed to give greater efficiency in high-speed, high-delay environments (so-called high-speed TCP variants), and protocols that provide congestion control without reliability. For the former category, along with the deployed base of ‘vanilla’ TCP – TCP NewReno – the TCP variants BIC and CUBIC are widely used within Linux: for the latter category, the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) is currently on the IETF Standards Track. It is clear that future traffic patterns will consist of a mix of flows from these protocols (and others). So, it is important for users and network operators to be aware of the impact that these protocols may have on users. We show the measurement of fairness in throughput performance of DCCP Congestion Control ID 2 (CCID2) relative to TCP NewReno, and variants Binary Increase Congestion control (BIC), CUBIC and Compound, all in “out-of-the box” configurations. We use a testbed and endto- end measurements to assess overall throughput, and also to assess fairness – how well these protocols might respond to each other when operating over the same end-to-end network path. We find that, in our testbed, DCCP CCID2 shows good fairness with NewReno, while BIC, CUBIC and Compound show unfairness above round-trip times of 25ms

Design and analysis for TCP-friendly window-based congestion control

The current congestion control mechanisms for the Internet date back to the early 1980’s and were primarily designed to stop congestion collapse with the typical traffic of that era. In recent years the amount of traffic generated by real-time multimedia applications has substantially increased, and the existing congestion control often does not opt to those types of applications. By this reason, the Internet can be fall into a uncontrolled system such that the overall throughput oscillates too much by a single flow which in turn can lead a poor application performance. Apart from the network level concerns, those types of applications greatly care of end-to-end delay and smoother throughput in which the conventional congestion control schemes do not suit. In this research, we will investigate improving the state of congestion control for real-time and interactive multimedia applications. The focus of this work is to provide fairness among applications using different types of congestion control mechanisms to get a better link utilization, and to achieve smoother and predictable throughput with suitable end-to-end packet delay

Agile-SD: A Linux-based TCP Congestion Control Algorithm for Supporting High-speed and Short-distance Networks

Recently, high-speed and short-distance networks are widely deployed and their necessity is rapidly increasing everyday. This type of networks is used in several network applications; such as Local Area Networks (LAN) and Data Center Networks (DCN). In LANs and DCNs, high-speed and short-distance networks are commonly deployed to connect between computing and storage elements in order to provide rapid services. Indeed, the overall performance of such networks is significantly influenced by the Congestion Control Algorithm (CCA) which suffers from the problem of bandwidth under-utilization, especially if the applied buffer regime is very small. In this paper, a novel loss-based CCA tailored for high-speed and Short-Distance (SD) networks, namely Agile-SD, has been proposed. The main contribution of the proposed CCA is to implement the mechanism of agility factor. Further, intensive simulation experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance of Agile-SD compared to Compound and Cubic which are the default CCAs of the most commonly used operating systems. The results of the simulation experiments show that the proposed CCA outperforms the compared CCAs in terms of average throughput, loss ratio and fairness, especially when a small buffer is applied. Moreover, Agile-SD shows lower sensitivity to the buffer size change and packet error rate variation which increases its efficiency.Comment: 12 Page