Analysis of the competition between wired, DSL and wireless users in an access network

This paper analyzes the performance of a large population composed of several classes of long lived TCP flows experiencing packet losses due to random transmission errors and to congestion created by the sharing of a common tail-drop or RED bottleneck router. Each class has a different transmission error rate. This setting is used to analyze the competition between wired and wireless users in an access network, where one class (the wired class) has no or small (like BER in DSL) transmission error losses whereas the other class has higher transmission error losses, or the competition between DSL flows using different coding schemes. We propose a natural and simple model for the joint throughput evolution of several classes of TCP flows under such a mix of losses. Two types of random transmission error losses are considered: one where losses are Poisson and independent of the rate of the flow, and one where the losses are still Poisson but with an intensity that is proportional to the rate of the source. We show that the large population model where the population tends to infinity has a threshold (given in closed form) below which there are no congestion losses at all in steady state, and above which there is a stationary limiting regime in which we can compute both the mean value and the distribution of the rate obtained by each class of flow. We also show that the maximum mean value for the aggregated rate is achieved at the threshold.