TCP in networks with abrupt delay variations and random loss

Abstract

This paper provides a preliminary investigation of the effect of abrupt round-trip variations on the performance of different versions of TCP. It is shown that end-to-end goodput of a bulk TCP transfer can be severely limited by variations in RTT primarily due to the non-adaptiveness of TCP's timeout estimation and fast recovery thresholds. The paper proposes a model for evaluating the performance of TCP in environments with abrupt RTT changes and random packet loss and outlines possible future TCP improvements.