Adaptive rate-based congestion control versus TCP-SS: a performance comparison

Recent simulation studies of TCP congestion control Slow-Start clearly show problems of oscillatory behavior in packet delay, congestion windows and throughput. Furthermore, it also suffers from rapid fluctuations in queue length, periodic packet losses, and underutilization of the transmission line in a large pipeline size and/or two-way traffic environments. These studies also exhibit three fairness problems in TCP-SS: systematic discrimination of a particular connection in periodic traffic, a bias against a connection with a long round trip time and a bias against bursty traffic. Based on the principles of rate control and preventive congestion mechanism, the authors have developed a new adaptive rate-based (ARB) congestion avoidance scheme that avoids these problems present in TCP-SS. It is demonstrated through simulations that ARB outperforms TCP-SS in network efficiency and fairness