TCP behavior in sub packet regimes
Jay Chen, Janardhan R. Iyengar, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, Bryan Ford · 2011
Many network links in developing regions operate in the sub-packet regime, an environment where the typical per-flow throughput is less than 1 packet per round-trip time. TCP and other common congestion control protocols break down in the sub-packet regime, resulting in severe unfairness, high packet loss rates, and flow silences due to repetitive timeouts. To understand TCP's behavior in this regime, we propose a model particularly tailored to high packet loss-rates and relatively small congestion window sizes. We validate the model under a variety of network conditions.