An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of ECN with Fallback on the Internet

Abstract

In this paper, we used the data set of domain names Global Top 1M provided by Alexa to analyze the effectiveness of Fallback in ECN. For the same test server, we first negotiate a connection with Not-ECN-Capable, and then negotiate a connection with ECN-Capable, if the sender does not receive the response to ECN-Capable negotiation from the receiver by the end of retransmission timeout, it will enter the Fallback state, and switch to negotiating a connection with Not-ECN-Capable. By extracting the header fields of the TCP/IP packets, we confirmed that in most regions, connectivity will be slightly improved after Fallback is enabled and Fallback has a positive effect on the total time of the whole access process. Meanwhile, we provided the updated information about the characteristics related to ECN with Fallback in different regions by considering the geographical region distribution of all targeted servers.