An analytical model of non-persistent TCP sessions sharing a congested internet link

A number of analytical models of the TCP behavior have been presented recently. Most of the studies on TCP assume a fixed number of persistent TCP connections. A few of the recent studies look at non-persistent TCP connections but with many limiting assumptions. Moreover, nearly all non-persistent studies are macroscopic and not scalable. This paper introduces a scalable stochastic reward Petri nets (SRNs) model for non-persistent TCP sessions. The suggested model is constructed in a microscopic approach which captures the essential protocol features of the congestion control mechanism used by the TCP Reno protocol. Several limiting assumptions have been relaxed by this model. The interference from other non-persistent sources is introduced to the model in an efficient way. Several performance metrics have been captured and compared to simulation results.