Quantifying the Deployment of TCP Options— A Comparative Study
Kostas Pentikousis, Hussein G. Badr · IEEE Communications Letters · 2004
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) performance evaluation studies need to use protocol configurations representative of real networks. However, the actual deployment of TCP options has not yet been quantified on a large scale. After analyzing a large set of traffic traces collected at 12 different monitoring points, we find that TCP segment sizes have a bimodal distribution, not a trimodal one as reported in recent studies. We show that the overwhelming majority of senders employ the maximum segment size option, large windows do not accompany SACK deployment, and explicit congestion notification (ECN) usage is negligible.