Characterizing and Predicting TCP Throughput on the Wide Area Network

DualPats exploits the strong correlation between TCP throughput and flow size, and the statistical stability of Internet path characteristics to accurately predict the TCP throughput of large transfers using active probing. We propose additional mechanisms to explain the correlation, and then analyze why traditional TCP benchmarking fails to predict the throughput of large transfers well. We characterize stability and develop a dynamic sampling rate adjustment algorithm so that we probe a path based on its stability. Our analysis, design, and evaluation is based on a large-scale measurement study