Impact of heterogeneous packet sizes on flow fairness

We analyze the fairness of bandwidth sharing between competing flows when the flows use different packet sizes. For systems where router buffers are defined in packets, we notice that larger packets get preferential treatment. Specifically, in networks, where a higher capacity link is followed by a lower capacity link, packet loss seen by streams with bigger packet size is smaller. We verify our findings by simulating both UDP and TCP traffic in ns2.