Influence of TCP congestion control on multifractal nature of network traffic

Abstract

The multifractal nature of traffic volume is known to have significant influence to queuing behavior in network nodes. In the Internet, TCP traffic, which is the major traffic flowing through the Internet has been reported to have multifractal nature. To control the effect of the multifractal nature, the origin of the multifractal nature in TCP traffic needs to be explained. However, it is still unclear what part of TCP control mostly affects the multifractal nature. In this paper, we focus on TCP congestion control from the viewpoint of multifractal nature of generated traffic. We investigate “what component of TCP congestion control mechanism affects multifractal nature of generated traffic?” Our simulation results show that Retransmission Time-Out mechanism plays an important role for multifractal nature of TCP traffic. In addition, our results show that avoiding occurrence of Retransmission Time Out is the best approach to improve TCP performance, i.e., throughput degradation, LRD, and multifractal nature. Random Early Detection (RED), based on the fact that Retransmission Time Out should be avoided, to improve TCP performance are also reasonable from the viewpoint of LRD and multifractal nature. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 90(1): 68–76, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.20277