Experimental Evaluation of TCP Protocols for High-Speed Networks

In this paper, we present experimental results evaluating the performance of the scalable-TCP, HS-TCP, BIC-TCP, FAST-TCP, and H-TCP proposals in a series of benchmark tests. In summary, we find that both scalable-TCP and FAST-TCP consistently exhibit substantial unfairness, even when competing flows share identical network path characteristics. Scalable-TCP, HS-TCP, FAST-TCP, and BIC-TCP all exhibit much greater RTT unfairness than does standard TCP, to the extent that long RTT flows may be completely starved of bandwidth. Scalable-TCP, HS-TCP, and BIC-TCP all exhibit slow convergence and sustained unfairness following changes in network conditions such as the start-up of a new flow. FAST-TCP exhibits complex convergence behavior.