On the transient behavior of TCP Vegas

Abstract

Research has shown that TCP Vegas performs better than TCP Reno with respect to overall network utilization, stability, fairness, throughput, packet loss, and burstiness. We analyze and improve the transient behavior of TCP Vegas, an important issue in today's large "bandwidth-delay product" networks. To quantify of our analysis, we introduce a new metric that captures the transient performance of TCP, namely, the (normalized) convergence time. We then consider the slow-start mechanism in TCP Vegas and show that, with a properly configured /spl gamma/ parameter, the transient behavior of TCP Vegas improves with respect to convergence time.