On the fair coexistence of loss- and delay-based TCP

Delay-based TCP variants continue to attract a large amount of attention in the networking community. Potentially, they offer the possibility to efficiently use network resources while at the same time achieving low queueing delay and virtually zero packet loss. One major impediment to the deployment of delay-based TCP variants is their inability to coexist fairly with standard loss-based TCP. In this paper we propose a simple strategy to make the fair coexistence possible and to ensure that delay-based flows will revert back to the delay-based operation when loss-based flows are no longer present. Analytical and ns-2 simulation results are presented to validate the proposed algorithm.