A discrete time analysis of TCP in presence of cross traffic

The object of this paper is to explore the behaviour of a TCP connection in presence of exogenous non-controlled traffic and to study the impact of TCP operation on the performance as seen by this traffic. General equations for the queue state evolution are derived and an explicit solution is given for constant rate traffic. Such a model applies to video or sound exogenous traffic and may give an insight on the phenomena for random traffic for certain network configurations (large buffers, low traffic variance). The performance criteria evaluated are TCP throughput, buffer occupancy distribution and evolution in time, packet loss rates and frequency of loss periods