Effect of Higher Priority EF Traffic and TCP Throughput and Fairness
Jasleen Kaur, Harrick M. Vin · 2001
In this paper, we study the effect on TCP of assigning higher-priority to traffice requesting Expedited Forwarding (EF) service in a Differentiated Services network. We analyze networks in which (1) EF traffice occupies different fractions of link bandwidth and is bursty at different time-scales; and (2) multiple TCP flows with heterogeneous round trip times share the network with the EF traffic. We find that even in the presence of bursty EF traffic, statistical multiplexing gains allow TCP to utilize most of the available bandwidth. Further, the presence of bursty EF traffic improves the fairness of bandwidth allocation among TCP flows; smaller more frequent bursts yield larger improvements in TCP fairness.