Comparative Study on the Self-Similarity of TCP Reno and TCP Vegas

Abstract

Self-similar traffic patterns have been observed in many measurements of Internet traffic. Self-similarity is very detrimental to the performance of packet networks and recent research has focused on understanding and reducing its amount in Internet traffic. TCP Reno has been identified as being one of the primary sources of self-similarity. We explore the potential of another version of TCP in this paper to reduce the degree of self-similarity in aggregated TCP traffic. We decompose both TCP Reno and TCP Vegas to demonstrate and explain their underlying mechanisms, and separately measure what effects congestion-avoidance and timeouts/exponential backoff mechanisms have on the self-similarity in aggregated TCP flows. We reveal how TCP Vegas reduces the degree of self-similarity and eventually completely eliminates it from aggregated TCP flows at low levels of packet loss. However, at high levels of packet loss we show that TCP Vegas is detrimental, because it increases the degree of aggregated TCP-flow self-similarity.