Fairness issues for mixed TCP/OSI internets

The author focuses on experiments and simulations designed to examine the difficulties in providing a fair communication service in an internet carrying traffic from the transport control protocol (TCP) and open systems interconnection (OSI) applications. Fairness between connections that compete for resources is a goal of congestion control schemes that have been developed for both protocol suites. The slow start congestion control mechanism is now fairly standard for TCP, and the DEC-bit approach to congestion avoidance is widely accepted for OSI networks with a connectionless network layer. Unfortunately, these two approaches have evolved independently and are not designed to provide fairness between protocol suites. The network experiments and simulations reported examined the extent of fairness problems to be expected in a mixed TCP/OSI environment and the effects of a simple router-based measure to limit unfairness between protocol suites.<>