A study on reduction of traffic burstiness using window based segment spacing

Abstract

It has been frequently reported that the well-known problems in congestion control are caused by burstiness and unpredictability of traffic, and that burstiness and unpredictability of traffic are concerned with the characteristics of multimedia traffic itself. Therefore much research on traffic engineering has been focused on building traffic models to efficiently adapt multimedia traffic to the Internet. But, we find that lack of traffic shaping in conventional congestion control algorithms also makes traffic more bursty because conventional congestion control algorithms just only restrict the upper limit of the sending capability of TCP sessions during a RTT. As a result, TCP sessions can send the allowed maximum data at once without considering network congestion. This pattern of traffic generation can enlarge problems of burstiness and unpredictability of traffic. This paper suggests a new traffic generation algorithm for alleviating burstiness of traffic by introducing a traffic shaping concept into congestion control. The proposed method is "window based segment spacing", it can control data to be spaced evenly between segments during a RTT before sending. We present the improved result by using network simulator, ns2. The suggested algorithm can reduce packet loss to less than a half of that of conventional algorithms.