Analysis and Improvement of the Fairness between Long-lived and Short-lived TCP Connections
Koichi Tokuda, Go Hasegawa, Masayuki Murata · 2001
Short-lived TCP connections, which send small documents, suffer from significant low throughput compared with long-lived TCP connections, which transmit large documents, because of an inherent nature of the ACK-based window flow control of TCP. In this paper, we focus on the unfairness problem of TCP connections transmitting differently sized of documents. We first confirm the unfairness property through simple simulation results, and show the necessity of fairness improvement algorithms at the router buffer. As the preparation for realizing that, we next introduce a new analysis approach in order to estimate the throughput of TCP connections in the case where the packet loss probability of each transmitted packet is different. Our analysis can give better estimation of the TCP throughput than the existing analysises. Using the analysis results, we propose new algorithms to improve the fairness, and investigate their effectiveness through simulation results. We show that our proposed algorithms can provide better fairness than the previously proposed algorithm without degradation of the network utilization. 1