AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON THE PERFORMANCE AND FAIRNESS OF LOSS DIFFERENTIATION FOR TCP
Johan Garcia, Anna Brunström · 2004
This paper investigates the performance and fairness of receiver-based loss differentiation for TCP. Experimentshave been performed with a FreeBSD kernel implementation. As expected, the results verify theeffectiveness of receiver-based loss differentiation when corruption losses are present. However, if the the corruptinglink is shared with users that do not employ loss differentiation, the performance gain typically comesat the expense of increased unfairness. The results show that a single loss differentiating user may in somecases reduce the bandwidth of users without loss differentiation with up to 35 percent, but there are also cases where loss differentiation has limited fairness implications. The results further show that if a user employs multiple TCP connections over the corrupting link the negative effects of corruption losses are reduced. This is true even if all connections employ regular TCP. Hence, multiple connections at the application level can to some extent be used as a simple mechanism to limit the impact of corruption losses.